Black Ghosts in the Afro-Pampas

Haunting and Folklorisation in Aldo Locatelli's 'Negrinho do Pastoreio' Paintings

Bibliographic Data

ID2170386
AuthorsRyan B Morrison (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume29
Issue3
Pages401-422
Publication date2020-07-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1356-9325 • E-ISSN: 1469-9575
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13569325.2020.1853080
OpenAlexW3126909564
LanguageEN
References cited14

In this article, I investigate how Blackness as spectre – a deathly presence – underlies contemporary life in the Pampas through artistic representations of the “Negrinho do Pastoreio” folktale in the work of Italian-Brazilian painter Aldo Locatelli (Bergamo, 1915 – Porto Alegre, 1962). These pieces folklorise Blackness and fix Black haunting in the Pampas through visual motifs of placelessness, timelessness, suffering, “martyrdom”, flight, and resurrection. The tropes and folklorisation itself confine and consign the Black population to the region’s distant past, denying contemporary existence, subjectivity, and agency in the present. This study forms part of a larger project engaging literature, iconography, and oral testimony in a racialised re-reading of the Platine Region. This racial-spatial project investigates the place of Blackness in the real and imagined transnational Pampas. While cultural hegemony in the Region predicates itself upon spatial and temporal displacement of its Black population, my work probes and contests this historical assertion precisely by locating Blackness in the region, in what I envision as a real and imagined space: what I call the “Afro-Pampas

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Literature · Painting · Population · Sociology · Subjectivity · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Arts and Performance Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy

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