O negro herói e seu traje : sentidos do consumo de vestuário pelo movimento da negritude na contemporaneidade

Abstract

Embellishing the body of most people in the world, clothing is one of the elements by which we construct the representation of our Self in the everyday, making others and ourselves perceive in which identity categories we fit even if momentarily. In this dissertation, we had as general objective to understand the participation of clothing in the construction of the negritude discourse of the contemporary movement of negritude. To do this, we did an ethnographic/netnographic research based on the Facebook profile of 64 black anti-racist people who fight for the valorization of the black people and of a common black/African identity. By observing and participating in the interactions that arose in the contents published by these individuals, we could perceive that the consumption of clothing as a discourse of blackness and Africanity participates in a narrative that places the Negro as a Hero. This narrative begins in an ideal African past, in which the Negro was powerful and free, having autonomy even to create its own ways of dressing. However, this freedom is stolen by the White Man who brings black people from Africa to the New World, oppressing them by devaluing and "erasing" their black bodies, black culture and Afro-Brazilian religions; and black men and women will be discouraged or prevented from wearing pieces of clothing and accessories that highlight their bodies, refer to black culture or show that they belong to African-American religions, because wearing such clothing can turn them into targets for prejudice and discrimination. However, in resistance to these forms of oppression perpetrated by the racist and Eurocentric culture, black men and women will find in the consumption of black/African aesthetic apparel a way to empower themselves, by demonstrating through the use these clothes and accessories that tey are proud to be and that they love to be black and african/afro/afro-diasporic. Thus, the Black Hero symbolically returns to Africa through the use of clothes and accessories that build the idea of a black body, a black culture and an African religiosity prior to the influences of racism and Eurocentrism. Despite this, the black men and women of the study still have a hybrid identity that shows the freedom they find, in the end, to be able to adopt the aesthetic references that go back to romanticized Africa or that demonstrates that they also belogn to the modern West world.