Introduction

Introduction:From Solidão, to Isolation, to Solidão-rity Luciane Ramos Silva, Tanya L. Saunders, and Sarah Soanirina Ohmer "O que se pretende mostrar é que neste contexto social se definam as lógicas, que orientam processos de afetividade, emoções, dinâmicas de identidade de relações sociais, de dominação, de estratificações, de onde partem de escolhas ... o motivo é colonizador e que o racismo e o sexismo são ideologias e práticas socioculturais, que regulam as preferências afetivas das pessoas, ganhando materialidade no corpo racializado e sexualizado, colaborando especialmente para a solidão de alguns segmentos de mulheres negras de Salvador." (Pacheco 2013, 17-18) From Solidão, to Isolation, to Solidão-rity Here we are, June 1, 2021, completing the introduction for the first WSQ issue during a pandemic that highlights the racialized nature of global inequalities. It has been a most challenging time for ethnic and racialized minorities. Here in the Americas, the pandemics of COVID-19, police-and state-mandated violence, and hypercapitalism have a dire effect on Black and Indigenous communities. While we are entering into a post-pandemic moment with the vaccine in the U.S., the pandemic rages across the world, with one of several global epicenters being Brazil. Across this hemisphere we have lost/are losing many people in the struggle to survive the pandemic, physically, economically, emotionally, and psychologically. When we began this special issue centering the concept of solidão, we connected with this important way of theorizing Black femininities largely through reflecting on our lived experiences and the lived experiences of our loved ones. Never would we have imagined that we would reconnect with thinking, feeling, and experiencing solidão, from various points across the [End Page 16] Americas so intensely, and daily, for so long. We write this introduction with very heavy hearts. At the same time, true to the various dimensions of how we have come to experience solidão, we also write with fire in our hearts, with defiance, and the recognition of how we, like so many of our loved ones and ancestors, can take such a heavy experience that is rooted in larger racialized social processes external to ourselves and turn it into a point of enfranchisement. For example, like so many others across the diaspora, the shift to a digital public sphere nearly eliminated the collective isolation imposed by national borders for those of us working across the African diaspora in the Americas. We are living a moment of connection where virtual meetings and other creative moves connect us as we are able, like the Black sapatão translators Jessica Oliveira and Bruna Barros once said, to rise above our linguistic and geographical isolations and unsettle the collective solidão that we, as African-descendant people, have experienced since our dispersion. We dedicate this issue to all of us. Our ancestors and orixás, who weave the paths that we tread, brought the three of us together in this Solidão project in 2018. And as we associate new connotations to the term solidão, we have woven a new one: solidãoridade. We have come to develop a new form of community building from the affective position that structures the subjectivities of those socialized into Black womanhood and Black femininity, or solidão, in which we recognize that socialization into Black femininities does not depend on being classified as "female" at birth. From this affective position during the pandemic, we share a diasporic, collective grief of lives lost to structural racism, whether through violences such as inadequate health care, police violence, or the various forms of colonial violence directed at Black gender- and sexual-dissidents. Through the collective grief, we conspire solidão-ridade. We share the shock of losing yet another loved one to police violence and the state public policies that are explicitly indifferent to the needs of Black and Brown people. Despite the shock, we conjure solidão-ridade. Recognizing the intensity of this deep grief for Black people, and how intensely this is felt for Black women given the intersectionality of our existence in these systems imbued with coloniality, we join hands in

Isolation · Pandemic · Xenophobia · Social and Political Issues

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