Abstract: Sueli Carneiro’s Dispositivo de Racialidade applies Michel Foucault’s concepts to the phenomenon of Brazilian raciality, exploring epistemicide and state genocide. The book reports on the resistance of black activists, discusses education and ethics, and challenges Eurocentric perspectives while highlighting the fight against systemic racism in Brazil.

Keywords: Raciality device, racism, and epistemicide.

Sueli Carneiro, a Brazilian philosopher, wrote ‘Dispositivo de Racialidade: A Construção do Outro como Não Ser como Fundamento do Ser.’ In this work, Carneiro applies Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘device’ and ‘biopower’ to the field of raciality, presenting the existence of a raciality/biopower device operating in Brazilian society. The author argues that this device encompasses various elements, including epistemicide, which generates knowledge, powers, and subjectivities that affect education. The book explores how the state wields the power to decide who lives or dies, as in the case of genocide. The book was published in 2023 by Zahar. It includes an afterword by Yara Frateschi, a professor of ethics and political philosophy at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), who describes the book as one of the most significant political philosophy books written in Brazil.

Sueli Carneiro is a philosopher and activist with a PhD in Education from the University of São Paulo. She is the executive coordinator of the Geledés Black Women’s Institute, which she co-founded, and has extensive experience in researching and working in the areas of race, gender, and human rights. Carneiro is also the author of two books: Racism, Sexism, and Inequality in Brazil (2011) and The Color of Prejudice (2006). The published book is based on her 2005 thesis, which reflects on the existence of a device of raciality and biopower in Brazil. One of the most violent elements of this device is epistemicide. The book is divided into 10 chapters, spread over 3 parts, and spans 479 pages.

In the first part of the book, made up of four chapters, Carneiro presents Michael Foucault’s concept of “device”, which is made up of relations of knowledge and power, and involves multiple elements such as scientific statements, laws, institutions, philosophical propositions that shape subjectivities and determine differences. The device, according to Foucault, has a strategic function for a dominant group, exercising a role of control over others. Based on this thought, the author understands that the encounter between this hegemonic “I” and racialized peoples, in the process of the “conquests”, gave it superiority by making the other inferior for not having the skin tone of whiteness, which would be the representation of the norm. Carneiro also establishes a dialogue between the French philosopher’s “device” and the concept of the “racial contract”, by the African-American philosopher Charles Mills, who states: since the 15th century, the world has been dominated by a European conception.

Through this dialogue, the author proposes the concept of a “raciality device” as “a duality between positive and negative, with skin color being the identifying factor of the normal and whiteness its representation. This constitutes an ontology of being and an ontology of difference, because the subject is, for Foucault, the effect of discursive practices” (p.x). By explaining to the reader what the device of raciality is, the philosopher exposes the violence in which genocide and epistemicide operate in Brazilian society against the black population, exemplifying the action of the state in defining who will live or die based on a Eurocentric understanding of humanity, victimizing black men and women in different ways.

The second part of the book is made up of four chapters, each presenting the life story of black movement activists, their family relationships and educational background. The first of these is literature professor Edson Cardoso, a black activist since the 1970s. Carneiro recounts the importance of studies and of the black grouping in boosting his identity and how racial awareness made him find himself. The second is Sônia Maria Pereira Nascimento, a lawyer and activist, the daughter of a domestic worker who gained access to education through her mother’s obsession with studying and the fight for her own home. The author highlights her meeting with Sueli Carneiro as a starting point for the awakening of racial consciousness, when they worked together in a public agency and the founding of Geledés – Black Women’s Institute. Her work in law was also directed towards racial causes, playing a critical role in her work. The third “witness” is the doctor and activist Fátima Oliveira, also marked by the value of education for her family. As a medical student, she became racially aware through contact with a professor at her university and stood out in her field for combining scientific knowledge with her anti-racist and feminist activism. Finally, the author introduces the late poet and activist Arnaldo Xavier, highlighting his revolutionary work and opposition to the device of raciality through the art of the word.

In the first chapter of part three, Sueli Carneiro discusses the concept of education as both negation and affirmation. She provides examples of how the school environment can be the site of the first experiences of racial negation. Carneiro also explores the life trajectories of black movement militants and the knowledge they acquire through their activism, as well as their family relationships and professional activities, which she refers to as positive education. At the end of this investigation, the philosopher discusses the notion of ‘renewed ethics’, which involves caring for oneself and others, and the production of memory as a liberating practice. This practice is exercised collectively in the act of resistance. From this perspective, the author presents Nelson Mandela’s political actions and his thoughts on collective freedom as a major reference.

Carneiro discusses the effective use of militant action in establishing a model of identification through the historical rescue of Zumbi dos Palmares as a symbolic strategy. This strategy provides an escape route from the device.

Readers familiar with the author’s career and her work in black feminism may find some points in the book discomforting. For instance, the lack of dialogue with black Brazilian thinkers like Lélia González and Beatriz Nascimento can be questioned. Additionally, the use of male authors as the primary sources of thought, including the Western philosopher Michael Foucault, may also be a point of contention.

However, the book is very illuminating on the concepts of Michel Foucault, Charles Mills, and Boaventura de Souza Santos, and is very careful to address epistemicide, a concept located in the epistemology of the southern current. Despite the apparent contradiction, the choice of a concept from a French philosopher such as Foucault is a clever strategy that she herself denounces in her introduction, in a first-person dialogue with the “hegemonic I” with the intention of being heard.

The philosopher also curates witnesses to her research. They are activists whose political and professional careers began in the mid-1970s, contemporaries of hers, not only from the Southeast but also from the Northeast. The very description of each of them makes it clear to the reader that these are people close to her day-to-day activism. The choices well represent the complexity of the action of the racial apparatus in Brazil, with stories that revolve around common social issues in black trajectories, such as interracial relationships, colorism in the family, paternal abandonment, single motherhood of black women, exploitation of domestic workers, and the difficulty of black students to stay in universities.

The book fulfills the purpose expressed by the author at the beginning of the publication to apply the concepts of device and biopower to the domain of raciality by developing an in-depth approach to them and relating them to thinking from a racial and decolonial perspective. By mobilizing witnesses to show how the device of raciality operates in Brazil, Carneiro succeeds in proving that the black Brazilian population does not live in a racial democracy.

Summary of Dispositivo de racialidade: a construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser

• Introdução: Emancipação para todos
• Apresentação: O Ser e o Outro
• I. Poder, saber e subjetivação
  • 1. Do dispositivo:
  • 2. O biopoder: Negritude sob o signo da morte
  • 3 Epistemicídio
  • 4 Interdições
• II. Resistências
  • 1 Edson Cardoso
  • 2 Sônia Maria Pereira Nascimento
  • 3 Fátima Oliveira
  • 4 Arnaldo Xavier, o poeta (In memorian)
• III. Educação e o cuidado de si
  • 1 Educação: Negação e afirmação
  • 2 Educação e o cuidado de si
• Fluxograma: Articulações funcionais entre saber, resistência e raça
• Posfácio: A filosofia prática de Sueli Carneiro – Yara Frareschi
• Agradecimentos
• Notas
• Referências bibliográficas
• Créditos das imagens
• Sobre a autora
• Créditos

Reviewer

Luciana Oliveira Vieira has a master’s degree in Cinema e Narrativas Sociais and a degree in Comunicação Social (Audiovisual) and a PhD candidate in Sociologia at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS). She is a member of the Grupo de Pesquisa Pós-Abolição no Mundo Atlântico (PAMA) and e General Director of EGBE — Mostra de Cinema Negro. He published, among other texts, Espaço-Quilombo: notas sobre mostras e festivais de cinema negro no Nordeste brasileiro (2022), co-authored with Laila Thaise Batista de Oliveira (2022) and Naira Évine Pereira Soares (2022), and Um modo Elekô de pensar e fazer cinema (2020) co-authored com Maria Beatriz Colucci. ID LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/3944076675063417; ID: ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2213-6665; E-mail: [email protected].

For cite this review 

CARNEIRO, Sueli. Dispositivo de racialidade: a construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2023. 431p. Review by: VIEIRA, Luciana Oliveira. Educação positivada. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.4, n.15, jan./feb., 2024. Available at <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/positive-education-luciana-oliveira-vieiras-ppgs-ufs-review-of-dispositivo-de-racialidade-a-construcao-do-outro-como-nao-ser-como-fundamento-do-ser-by-sueli-carneiro/>.

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Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.4, n. 15, jan./feb., 2024 | ISSN 2764-2666