Seminal book – Itamar Freitas’s (UFS/Uneb) review of “História do negro brasileiro”, by Clovis Moura
Clovis Moura | Image: Personal archive of Clovis Moura/Vermelho
Abstract: História do Negro brasileiro, written by Clovis Moura, investigates the influence of the black population in the construction of Brazil, emphasizing their struggle from the slavery era to the pursuit of recognition as citizens. Although the work has received criticism for contradictions and generalizations, its value lies in highlighting the historical importance of the black population in the formation of the Brazilian nation.
Keywords: Black History, Slavery, Citizenship.
História do Negro brasileiro was published in [1989] by Editora Ática, when Clovis Moura was still known as a “higher education teacher” and a journalist working in the State of São Paulo. The initial epigraph, from Bernardo de Vasconcelos (no date), added to the previous edition, may well represent the objective of the work, since the book, in this second edition, does not have a foreword, presentation, or introduction: “Our civilization comes from the coast of Africa”. Thus, we can assume that its objective, although not explicitly stated by the author, is: to demonstrate the presence of the black population in the national experience. It is a synthesis work, published in the context of a didactic collection for undergraduate students in higher education.
In the entry of the Brazilian Society of Sociology, Clovis Steiger de Assis Moura (1925–2003), from Piauí, Amarantes, is represented as an activist, communist, user of dialectical materialism, journalist, literary critic, and sociologist, working in Bahia and São Paulo. He published texts, now classics, discussing the black experience in its slave, quilombola (maroon community), worker, and citizen condition. Part of these attributes is explicit in the work in question, which adds to the well-known Slave Rebellions: quilombos, insurrections, guerrillas (1959) and Dictionary of Black Slavery in Brazil (2003). The history of the Brazilian black focuses on the experiences of black people between the 16th and 20th centuries, spread over 138 pages, grouped into seven chapters, in addition to “critical vocabulary” and “commented literature”.
The book’s overarching objective, pointed out above, is reinforced by the foreword writer of the current edition, Petrônio Domingues, who characterizes Moura’s work as “Black Marxism,” highlights his critique of Gilberto Freire’s harmonious view of slavery, and emphasizes the pioneering theses on the resistance and protagonism of the Black population in the pre- and post-abolition period. The afterword by Ynaê Lopes dos Santos follows in the same vein, highlighting the innovative concept of “quilombismo” and pointing out another historiographic trend criticized by Moura: economism.
In the first two chapters, the author states that the black population (between 4 and 10 million enslaved) compulsorily migrating from Africa is the “great settler” of Brazil. The black population were workers and settlers who were poorly fed, exploited to exhaustion, punished, and tortured by white masters, between the 16th and 19th centuries.
In the third chapter, the words “quilombagem” (the act of forming quilombos) and “quilombo” are transformed into sociological categories to demonstrate the effectiveness of the black experience in national formation. Quilombagem is described as a “movement of permanent rebellion organized and directed by the slaves themselves” and a “constellation of protest movements of the slave”, from which figures such as “João Mulungu”, in Sergipe, and “Lucas da Feira”, in Bahia, stood out. Quilombo is the “organizational center of quilombagem,” a point of arrival and departure for different “forms of rebellion”.
In the fourth chapter, the emphasis of the statements falls on the idea of the black population as co-creator of a national culture. The author claims that the black was a protagonist and skilled negotiator, qualities demonstrated by the partial results of Christian and white acculturation (syncretism). The white population, he continues, used syncretism as an instrument of ideological domination to subjugate the blacks. In contrast, the black population used the character of their clothing, food, and religion as a tool of resistance to this subjugation.
Following (fifth chapter), the author states that blacks (enslaved or free) were protagonists in the struggles for liberation, let’s say, national, but they were under different strategies (escaping, acting as soldiers or bandits) and levels of libertarian consciousness (“manipulated mass” and conscious agents). Depending on the profile of political claims, blacks joined more conservative movements, such as the Minas Conspiracy, or more liberal events, such as the 1817 Revolution.
In the sixth chapter, the author introduces breaks in the narrated time and in the narrative time. There, the author declares that slavery enters into decline in the second half of the century for a composition of causes. He cites economic background propositions, such as the end of the slave trade, the expansion of the coffee economy, and the attempt to replace the now expensive slave labor. Finally, he cites the change in behavior of intellectuals and landowners, in the sense of protecting the remaining slaves (considered remaining assets).
The last chapter of the book (the seventh) is reserved for the experience after May 13, 1888. For the author, this is the time of struggles for “citizenship,” spread across the fields of politics, press, art, and science. It is a contradictory search, experienced, for example, in the “Revolt of the Lash” (against state authoritarianism), in the “Black Guard” (monarchist), and in the establishment of a black press (militant for ethnic identity or alienated from contemporary issues of national politics and union organization, aligned with integralism, enthusiasts of militias). Between the 1950s and 1970s, for the author, there is a certain rebirth in the organization of blacks around issues of ethnic identity and combating racism, such as the Cultural Association of the Black and the Unified Black Movement. This last time, with which the author concludes his history, is limited to the time lived by Clovis Moura (little addressed in the book).
As a synthesis work on an emerging theme, in the post-military dictatorship period, inaugurated in 1964, the history told by Moura is dotted with some contradictions. He positions blacks, along with Indians and whites, as co-creators of a national culture, legitimizing the myth of racial democracy (Brazilian national identity based on the interaction of three races). He makes the same mistake when he denounces the expropriation of freedom and inhumane treatment but legitimizes and maintains the civilizational substrate: nation. He states that the Brazilian nation existed and owes such a result to the blacks. Moreover, he positions himself pendulum-like in at least three highlighted moments, between: 1. understanding the thoughts and actions of the right, within blacks, and condemning them, considering such ideas and behaviors as “ideological contradictions”; 2. attributing foundational value to quilombismo for the overthrow of slavery and recognizing that the “idea of emancipation of slaves”, although “utopian” and “sporadic”, only emerges after 1850 (structural crisis); and 3. understanding quilombagem as a phenomenon protagonized solely by slaves and also a phenomenon protagonized by “persecuted Indians”, “people generally persecuted by the police”.
Some anachronisms and undue generalizations are also notable in the work. Moura conceives of nation before the existence of the Brazilian National-State itself, by announcing quilombagem as a “national phenomenon”, in addition to using the expression “manipulated mass” to characterize a level of black action, when part of that contingent was devoid of legal freedom, which demonstrates, probably, the use of expression more akin to a situation of populism, in the 20th
century. Moura makes an undue generalization when he states that the black “united… struggles of the exploited to the claims of the black ethnicity” (p.40). Moura, finally, makes imprecise use of some words turned into categories in his writing. This is the case of “ethos” — which oscillates between a body of principles (ideals), race identity, “fundamental contradiction of the slave regime”. Ethos is also used without the accompaniment of definitions, at least on two occasions. This is still the case of “citizenship”, used to express the distinctive traits of different natures of events, institutions, and ideas, manifested in different times.
Despite these imperfections, we think there should be little doubt about the positive value of Clovis Moura’s statements for the fight against the forgetting of the black experience in Brazilian history. He denounces the expropriation of freedom and the conditions of existence of the black population. He embodies the thesis of black protagonism and its relative capacity for negotiation, especially when conceiving the maintenance of syncretism as the result of a culture of resistance. Blacks seemingly accepted to actually maintain their ethos. From a theoretical methodological standpoint, the value of the work is expressed in the initiative to classify behaviors of blacks in relation to phenomena of liberation, to identify and classify nationalist movements in their conflicting ideologies, and to approach the statistics on the demography of the black population cautiously.
If we also consider that it is a synthesis work (or a vulgarization of knowledge), some of the flaws pointed out above will be charged to the initiatives of the textual genre that proposes to assign meaning (present guiding threads) to a lacunar and rarefied knowledge. Note that the first three centuries of the Brazilian black experience are narrated on ideas of hierarchical structures. For the 20th century, however, the narrative disperses among events, people, and ideas aggregated in a supposedly self-evident category of meaning called citizenship. From the more recent times (1970s and 1980s), the narrator himself avoids dealing with, probably to avoid injustices or even because recent literature on the matter would not exist in a systematized way. The critical vocabulary and commented bibliography, despite being a commendable editorial initiative, are quite timid sections in their substantive content, considering the author’s erudition.
If we hypothetically consider, finally, that the great goal of the book was to combat the invisibility of the black experience in national history, we will consider the objective as achieved. In the book, the author demonstrates the black protagonism in national history through the analysis and exemplification of phenomena of the economy, culture, and politics, as well as the analysis of events of nationalist inspiration and initiatives for the constitution of ethnic identities and combating racism.
16 national films with black protagonism for you to know. The short film Kbela is one of the suggestions mentioned below! Image: Release/CasaVogue
More than three decades after its release, as we try to demonstrate here, if it does not maintain the main lines of repair and the fight against forgetting, under more radical rubrics of decolonialism, the work gains the status of an index on the state of the art, at the end of the 90s, and a safe harbor to observe how much we have advanced (or not), until this year of 2023. Therefore, it remains an excellent initiation to the history of the black in Brazil for militants of the black movements, those interested in the fight against racism, and specialists in studies of African diasporas and post-abolitionism.
References
NOGUEIRA, Fábio. Clóvis Moura. Bionotas. Porto Alegre, Sociedade Brasileira de Sociologia (SBS), sd. Disponível em <https://sbsociologia.com.br/project/clovis-moura/>.
Summary of História do Negro brasileiro
1. O grande povoador
2. O negro escravo no Brasil-colônia
3. A quilombagem como agente de mudança social
4. A variável cultural
5. O negro e sua participação política
6. A decadência da escravidão e a crise do sistema
7. Em busca da cidadania
8. Vocabulário crítico
9. Bibliografia comentada.
Seminal book – Itamar Freitas’s (UFS/Uneb) review of “História do negro brasileiro”, by Clovis Moura
20 January 2024
Clovis Moura | Image: Personal archive of Clovis Moura/Vermelho
Abstract: História do Negro brasileiro, written by Clovis Moura, investigates the influence of the black population in the construction of Brazil, emphasizing their struggle from the slavery era to the pursuit of recognition as citizens. Although the work has received criticism for contradictions and generalizations, its value lies in highlighting the historical importance of the black population in the formation of the Brazilian nation.
Keywords: Black History, Slavery, Citizenship.
História do Negro brasileiro was published in [1989] by Editora Ática, when Clovis Moura was still known as a “higher education teacher” and a journalist working in the State of São Paulo. The initial epigraph, from Bernardo de Vasconcelos (no date), added to the previous edition, may well represent the objective of the work, since the book, in this second edition, does not have a foreword, presentation, or introduction: “Our civilization comes from the coast of Africa”. Thus, we can assume that its objective, although not explicitly stated by the author, is: to demonstrate the presence of the black population in the national experience. It is a synthesis work, published in the context of a didactic collection for undergraduate students in higher education.
In the entry of the Brazilian Society of Sociology, Clovis Steiger de Assis Moura (1925–2003), from Piauí, Amarantes, is represented as an activist, communist, user of dialectical materialism, journalist, literary critic, and sociologist, working in Bahia and São Paulo. He published texts, now classics, discussing the black experience in its slave, quilombola (maroon community), worker, and citizen condition. Part of these attributes is explicit in the work in question, which adds to the well-known Slave Rebellions: quilombos, insurrections, guerrillas (1959) and Dictionary of Black Slavery in Brazil (2003). The history of the Brazilian black focuses on the experiences of black people between the 16th and 20th centuries, spread over 138 pages, grouped into seven chapters, in addition to “critical vocabulary” and “commented literature”.
The book’s overarching objective, pointed out above, is reinforced by the foreword writer of the current edition, Petrônio Domingues, who characterizes Moura’s work as “Black Marxism,” highlights his critique of Gilberto Freire’s harmonious view of slavery, and emphasizes the pioneering theses on the resistance and protagonism of the Black population in the pre- and post-abolition period. The afterword by Ynaê Lopes dos Santos follows in the same vein, highlighting the innovative concept of “quilombismo” and pointing out another historiographic trend criticized by Moura: economism.
In the first two chapters, the author states that the black population (between 4 and 10 million enslaved) compulsorily migrating from Africa is the “great settler” of Brazil. The black population were workers and settlers who were poorly fed, exploited to exhaustion, punished, and tortured by white masters, between the 16th and 19th centuries.
In the third chapter, the words “quilombagem” (the act of forming quilombos) and “quilombo” are transformed into sociological categories to demonstrate the effectiveness of the black experience in national formation. Quilombagem is described as a “movement of permanent rebellion organized and directed by the slaves themselves” and a “constellation of protest movements of the slave”, from which figures such as “João Mulungu”, in Sergipe, and “Lucas da Feira”, in Bahia, stood out. Quilombo is the “organizational center of quilombagem,” a point of arrival and departure for different “forms of rebellion”.
In the fourth chapter, the emphasis of the statements falls on the idea of the black population as co-creator of a national culture. The author claims that the black was a protagonist and skilled negotiator, qualities demonstrated by the partial results of Christian and white acculturation (syncretism). The white population, he continues, used syncretism as an instrument of ideological domination to subjugate the blacks. In contrast, the black population used the character of their clothing, food, and religion as a tool of resistance to this subjugation.
Following (fifth chapter), the author states that blacks (enslaved or free) were protagonists in the struggles for liberation, let’s say, national, but they were under different strategies (escaping, acting as soldiers or bandits) and levels of libertarian consciousness (“manipulated mass” and conscious agents). Depending on the profile of political claims, blacks joined more conservative movements, such as the Minas Conspiracy, or more liberal events, such as the 1817 Revolution.
In the sixth chapter, the author introduces breaks in the narrated time and in the narrative time. There, the author declares that slavery enters into decline in the second half of the century for a composition of causes. He cites economic background propositions, such as the end of the slave trade, the expansion of the coffee economy, and the attempt to replace the now expensive slave labor. Finally, he cites the change in behavior of intellectuals and landowners, in the sense of protecting the remaining slaves (considered remaining assets).
The last chapter of the book (the seventh) is reserved for the experience after May 13, 1888. For the author, this is the time of struggles for “citizenship,” spread across the fields of politics, press, art, and science. It is a contradictory search, experienced, for example, in the “Revolt of the Lash” (against state authoritarianism), in the “Black Guard” (monarchist), and in the establishment of a black press (militant for ethnic identity or alienated from contemporary issues of national politics and union organization, aligned with integralism, enthusiasts of militias). Between the 1950s and 1970s, for the author, there is a certain rebirth in the organization of blacks around issues of ethnic identity and combating racism, such as the Cultural Association of the Black and the Unified Black Movement. This last time, with which the author concludes his history, is limited to the time lived by Clovis Moura (little addressed in the book).
As a synthesis work on an emerging theme, in the post-military dictatorship period, inaugurated in 1964, the history told by Moura is dotted with some contradictions. He positions blacks, along with Indians and whites, as co-creators of a national culture, legitimizing the myth of racial democracy (Brazilian national identity based on the interaction of three races). He makes the same mistake when he denounces the expropriation of freedom and inhumane treatment but legitimizes and maintains the civilizational substrate: nation. He states that the Brazilian nation existed and owes such a result to the blacks. Moreover, he positions himself pendulum-like in at least three highlighted moments, between: 1. understanding the thoughts and actions of the right, within blacks, and condemning them, considering such ideas and behaviors as “ideological contradictions”; 2. attributing foundational value to quilombismo for the overthrow of slavery and recognizing that the “idea of emancipation of slaves”, although “utopian” and “sporadic”, only emerges after 1850 (structural crisis); and 3. understanding quilombagem as a phenomenon protagonized solely by slaves and also a phenomenon protagonized by “persecuted Indians”, “people generally persecuted by the police”.
Some anachronisms and undue generalizations are also notable in the work. Moura conceives of nation before the existence of the Brazilian National-State itself, by announcing quilombagem as a “national phenomenon”, in addition to using the expression “manipulated mass” to characterize a level of black action, when part of that contingent was devoid of legal freedom, which demonstrates, probably, the use of expression more akin to a situation of populism, in the 20th
century. Moura makes an undue generalization when he states that the black “united… struggles of the exploited to the claims of the black ethnicity” (p.40). Moura, finally, makes imprecise use of some words turned into categories in his writing. This is the case of “ethos” — which oscillates between a body of principles (ideals), race identity, “fundamental contradiction of the slave regime”. Ethos is also used without the accompaniment of definitions, at least on two occasions. This is still the case of “citizenship”, used to express the distinctive traits of different natures of events, institutions, and ideas, manifested in different times.
Despite these imperfections, we think there should be little doubt about the positive value of Clovis Moura’s statements for the fight against the forgetting of the black experience in Brazilian history. He denounces the expropriation of freedom and the conditions of existence of the black population. He embodies the thesis of black protagonism and its relative capacity for negotiation, especially when conceiving the maintenance of syncretism as the result of a culture of resistance. Blacks seemingly accepted to actually maintain their ethos. From a theoretical methodological standpoint, the value of the work is expressed in the initiative to classify behaviors of blacks in relation to phenomena of liberation, to identify and classify nationalist movements in their conflicting ideologies, and to approach the statistics on the demography of the black population cautiously.
If we also consider that it is a synthesis work (or a vulgarization of knowledge), some of the flaws pointed out above will be charged to the initiatives of the textual genre that proposes to assign meaning (present guiding threads) to a lacunar and rarefied knowledge. Note that the first three centuries of the Brazilian black experience are narrated on ideas of hierarchical structures. For the 20th century, however, the narrative disperses among events, people, and ideas aggregated in a supposedly self-evident category of meaning called citizenship. From the more recent times (1970s and 1980s), the narrator himself avoids dealing with, probably to avoid injustices or even because recent literature on the matter would not exist in a systematized way. The critical vocabulary and commented bibliography, despite being a commendable editorial initiative, are quite timid sections in their substantive content, considering the author’s erudition.
If we hypothetically consider, finally, that the great goal of the book was to combat the invisibility of the black experience in national history, we will consider the objective as achieved. In the book, the author demonstrates the black protagonism in national history through the analysis and exemplification of phenomena of the economy, culture, and politics, as well as the analysis of events of nationalist inspiration and initiatives for the constitution of ethnic identities and combating racism.
16 national films with black protagonism for you to know. The short film Kbela is one of the suggestions mentioned below! Image: Release/CasaVogue
More than three decades after its release, as we try to demonstrate here, if it does not maintain the main lines of repair and the fight against forgetting, under more radical rubrics of decolonialism, the work gains the status of an index on the state of the art, at the end of the 90s, and a safe harbor to observe how much we have advanced (or not), until this year of 2023. Therefore, it remains an excellent initiation to the history of the black in Brazil for militants of the black movements, those interested in the fight against racism, and specialists in studies of African diasporas and post-abolitionism.
References
NOGUEIRA, Fábio. Clóvis Moura. Bionotas. Porto Alegre, Sociedade Brasileira de Sociologia (SBS), sd. Disponível em <https://sbsociologia.com.br/project/clovis-moura/>.
Summary of História do Negro brasileiro
1. O grande povoador
2. O negro escravo no Brasil-colônia
3. A quilombagem como agente de mudança social
4. A variável cultural
5. O negro e sua participação política
6. A decadência da escravidão e a crise do sistema
7. Em busca da cidadania
8. Vocabulário crítico
9. Bibliografia comentada.
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In the entry of the Brazilian Society of Sociology, Clovis Steiger de Assis Moura (1925–2003), from Piauí, Amarantes, is represented as an activist, communist, user of dialectical materialism, journalist, literary critic, and sociologist, working in Bahia and São Paulo. He published texts, now classics, discussing the black experience in its slave, quilombola (maroon community), worker, and citizen condition. Part of these attributes is explicit in the work in question, which adds to the well-known Slave Rebellions: quilombos, insurrections, guerrillas (1959) and Dictionary of Black Slavery in Brazil (2003). The history of the Brazilian black focuses on the experiences of black people between the 16th and 20th centuries, spread over 138 pages, grouped into seven chapters, in addition to “critical vocabulary” and “commented literature”.
