Beatriz Nascimento’s radical philosophy, action, and aesthetics served as the historical foundation for Black Brazilian movements in the 1970s and 1980s, during the country’s military dictatorship. The Dialectic Is in the Sea is the first English-language publication of her significant public scholarship.
Five chapters, including an interview with Nascimento herself, present her as a pioneering scholar of Black Brazilian and transatlantic histories, working in diasporic anthropology, history, ethnography, and sociology — subjects formerly dominated by White experts. Her daughter, Brazilian dancer Bethânia N. F. Gomes, introduces the book and provides insight into her mother’s personal and spiritual life.
Nascimento’s most significant contribution to her era’s social theories, as evidenced by essays by anthropologist Alex Ratts and translator Christen A. Smith, was her categorical rejection of the concept of racial democracy, which was developed in the 1930s by White Brazilian intellectuals including influential sociologist Gilberto Freyre. In his 1933 book The Masters and the Slaves, Freyre contended that because Portuguese settlers were more open to miscegenation than North American invaders, Brazil evolved a more inclusive and less racist society.
Nascimento understood how unrealistic Freyre’s utopian, latently racist, and sexist views were. Her pieces in the chapter named “The Black Woman” (written in first person, as opposed to her other theoretical writings in the book) are agonizingly honest about the everyday realities of violence and prejudice that she encountered growing up in Rio de Janeiro. Her wonderful autobiographical pieces “Toward Racial Consciousness” and “Maria Beatriz Nascimento: Researcher” describe the poignant narrative of Jurema, a very young student. Nascimento compares Jurema’s interrupted studies and early pregnancies to her own, reflecting on the daily abuse they both received from White teachers, as well as the tremendous loneliness felt by Black students in mostly White schools.
Nascimento began his activity while studying history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She then established a working group for Black Brazilians at the Federal University Fluminense, where she studied graduate courses and later enrolled in a Master’s degree while also working with the Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement) and other anti-racist organizations. In the meantime, she published pieces in Brazilian journals like Istoé and launched an ambitious endeavor to define a holistic history of Black Brazilians, first collecting research in the quilombo (backlands settlement of Black Brazilians) in Carmo da Mata and subsequently in Angola. Nascimento’s results highlighted the link between 17th-century Afro-Brazilian quilombos and poverty in Black urban areas, as well as Angolan and Brazilian colonial histories.
Nascimento’s studies of quilombos was very noteworthy. In her two-part essay, “Alternative Social Systems Organized by Black People: From Quilombos to Favelas,” she disputed the conventional scholarly idea that settlements were improvised, presenting them historically as self-emancipated formerly enslaved communities.Nascimento regarded them as autonomous political institutions formed to meet the military needs of wartime — Black Brazilians organizing to defend themselves against colonists — but constantly expanding between insurgencies as sites for trade and agriculture. Her redefinition of quilombos challenged White historians’ portrayal of Black Brazilians as passive recipients of freedom granted by the Portuguese Crown in 1888. Along with other Black Brazilian intellectuals, notably Lélia Gonzalez, she considered such theories as fuel for racist caricatures of Black Brazilians as passive or primitive. Nascimento criticized both the naïve and overly heroic or legendary views of quilombos, focusing instead on their political agency.
Nascimento’s study opened the ground for the ratification of Article 68 of the Brazilian Constitution in 1988, which officially acknowledged quilombo communities. It also prepared the ground for the founding of National Black Consciousness Day, which is celebrated yearly on November 20th, the anniversary of the execution of Zumbi, the last leader of Palmares’ quilombo people. According to Smith, Nascimento recognized that “land rights, cultural and historical acknowledgment, and the viability of a legal path to reparations” were at issue. Recent murders of Black activists, including Marielle Franco in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, and Black Brazilians’ calls for reparations for slavery, highlight the ongoing stakes.(In 1995, Nascimento was killed in a fight after being shot by the partner of a female friend she was defending. Decades after she wrote them, the depth and urgency of her essays remain a vital template for developing Brazil’s political awareness.