Anti-blackness and the embodiment of Black womanhood: Brazil and the Netherlands

In this talk discussed the imagination and the materiality of Black womanhood in Brazil, and made associations with the Netherlands. I sketched the contours of the idea of Blackness in the Brazilian national imaginary, borrowed from colonialism; and briefly discuss ed the concept of race entangled with gender and class, from the perspective of its giveness or relational nature, which are core concepts of Afro-pessimism. I then explored the particularities of the place of African women in settler colonialism and chattel slavery, focusing on her body. My express intention with this talk had been to lay bare the articulation between the imagination of gendered Blackness and the material experience of the female bodies overdetermined by race and gender. Hereby I purposefully intertwined the cultural representation of Black people and the socio-economic and political places assigned to Afro-descendant women.