The performance of total time: rupturing violence's long durée in gestures and gaps

by

Nohora Arrieta Fernández1

1.

Los Angeles's weather in April and May displays an unusual mildness for a city that, as Joan Didion once wrote, and contrary to the opinion of those who have not lived there, has “the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse” (221). In April and May, there is no news yet of the incendiary Santa Ana winds, nor has the June gloom risen from the ocean. The days are filled with an argentine and sober luminosity, in which every object seems to acquire its natural measure. A measure that makes incomprehensible that anyone could have built the windowless room where I found myself teaching a course entitled “Black Diasporic Aesthetics in Latin America: Writers and Visual Artists” in the spring of 2024. 

On those mornings, I was reluctant to leave the plenitude of the cleared sky to slip off between stairs and caves. However, the affliction did not last longer than the tiny time it took me to cross the lintel of the classroom, for the questions and conversations of my students were of a round and total luminosity. The purpose of our gathering was rather broad—Black Diasporic Aesthetics in Latin America—and, since it was the first course I taught as an assistant professor, almost amorphous: inspired by a multitude of novels, poems, performances, installations, and films of a group of Black women creators from Latin America and the Caribbean. We sought to understand, on the one hand, these authors' works in dialogue with long traditions of Black Latin American and Caribbean thought. On the other hand, we imagined them proposing categories of time, space, and aesthetics that expanded our understanding of such categories. In the face of the longue durée of the plantation —ways in which the persistence of colonial violence continues to condition Black life2—, we tried to imagine how these artistic works allowed life beyond plantation violence.

The reflections on performance, time, and space in Latin America that I am about to share were stimulated by the conversations I had with my students on those mornings. When I sit to write these reflections, I remember that those conversations significantly took place as my students, along with students from across the country, along with students from around the world, gathered outside of classrooms and created fugues: they created a space and time of radical solidarity, a space and time that resisted the order and violence of settler colonialism. By doing so, they, in fact, showed us —professors, friends, families— ways to flee the plantation in the spring of 2024.

2.

On August 25, 2018, I saw the performance Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam serem amadas at the Tomie Othake Institute, a center for contemporary art in São Paulo. The room is spacious, and I and the other attendants sit in a large semicircle. In the center of the room, there is a large clay vase, and next to it, a pile of sand and a small clay jar. Renata Felinto, artist and professor—as she describes herself—enters the room: she is wearing a long white skirt that covers her feet, a white top and a white scarf that covers her head. In her arms she holds what appears to be a wrapping, and a wrapped piece of green cloth crosses her back. She opens the wrapping on her arms and a bunch of photographs and red flowers are revealed.  

For a few minutes, Felinto circles the room showing reproductions of photographs of Black wet nurses (amas de leite) next to the white infants they cared for. I don't remember all the photos, but I do remember that in one of them, a grotesque play of light and shadow made three breasts appear on the woman's chest instead of two. Others were well-known images, like those of Mônica. Mônica was a Black wet nurse who accompanied Augusto Gomes Leal in a photograph taken by João Ferreira Villela in 1860. A few years later, Mônica, aged and with gray hair, appears with Isabel Adelaide Leal, in a photograph by Alberto Henschel.

Felinto distributes the reproductions to the attendants and then resumes her walking, this time with a reproduction of A Negra (1923), the painting by the iconic Brazilian modernist Tarsila do Amaral. Dressed in her white skirt and top—perhaps reminiscent of Black wet nurses,3 or perhaps in a reference to a sacred color in some ceremonies of Afro-Brazilian religions4—Felinto holds the painting over her body: the overlap is striking. A few minutes later, Felinto buries the reproduction in the large clay vase in the center of the room, using sand from the pile. After this burial, she takes more photographs, walks with them in front of us, and buries them in the large clay vase. The attendants, silently guided by Felinto, approach the vase and bury the reproductions that were given to them earlier.

3.

One of Tarsila de Amaral's most famous paintings, A Negra was inspired by the memory of a Black woman who took care of the artist during her childhood. Tarsila was the daughter of a family of coffee planters from São Paulo. The woman, the Black woman, represented with no name or surname, could probably have been an enslaved woman. In the painting, the white, blue, and brown color bands of the background simulate the sky and the earth. Next to the woman, is a leaf from a banana tree. A Negra's immense lip, immense breast, and immense hands seem to emphasize a body deformed by labor. According to Felinto, these “deformations,” characteristic of certain portraits of Brazilian modernism, place the Black woman's body within the framework of the representation of the Black body that was popular in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, a prominent time for European colonialist projects on the African continent.   

In the performance, Felinto situated A Negra alongside a tradition of photographs of Black wet nurses with white infants commissioned by the masters of the big houses. Kimberly Cleveland tells us that these photographs, mostly taken by European photographers who arrived in Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century, “fabricate a type.” What Cleveland means is that there is little in these photographs of the Black woman as an individual or a subject (3). The wet nurses are rarely named and appear instead as possessions of the masters, and mere companions to the central subject of the photograph, the white child they care for.  

Nameless faces of Black women, like A Negra, depicted in the solitude of work, detached from their families or communities, have characterized a way of imagining Black women in Brazil for decades. According to Rosana Paulino, “Visual arts created a whole iconography” for a certain imaginary “of the place and roles of Black women in Brazilian society” (229).5 This imaginary disregards the history of organization and struggle of the Brazilian Black populations and the Movimento Negro [Brazilian Black Movement]. It ignores long and complex Black artistic and intellectual traditions,6 and it is unable to perceive the gestures of refusal and revolt in the very faces of these nameless Black women.

4.

The fact that A Negra by Tarsila is said to have been inspired by a childhood memory is not just a small autobiographical detail to explain the origin of a painting. In the first half of the twentieth century, memories of the big house and the plantation in Brazil were often childhood memories, and the archive that is considered canonical today is described from the sweetened memory of the masters' children and grandchildren.7

In the first edition of Casa grande e senzala, published in 1933 by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, there is a watercolor of the Noruega sugar mill (Engenho Noruega) in Pernambuco, one of the largest sugar regions in Brazil in the XVI - XVIII centuries. The watercolor is signed by Cicero Dias, another leading name in Brazilian modernism, a close friend of Freyre's and, like him, a descendant of a sugar-plantation family. Referring to the large house of the Noruega sugar mill, Freyre says that it is “filled with living rooms, bedrooms, corridors, two convent kitchens, a pantry, a chapel”, and it is a ‘sincere and complete expression’ of the engrossing patriarchy of colonial times” (36).8 

Let's take a closer look at the watercolor: In the lower left corner, we see the tiny sugar mill buildings; the boiler house, where the sugar juice was prepared, and the purging house, where the juice was left to solidify. In the upper right corner, there is the very small building of the senzala (slave quarters), surrounded by the crops that the enslaved people grew to sustain their diet. In the upper left corner, almost invisible, are the sugar cane fields. In the center, is the big house, the largest building in the watercolor, and it is there that the painter's attention is focused; on the details of the large dining room, the kitchens, the chapels with their altars and crucifixes, the rooms (thirteen or fourteen?), the furnishings of these rooms (mirrors, beds, wardrobes) and what happens in them. What happens, we see, is that Black people, mostly women, work: cutting food on a table, ironing a dress, bathing a young man, braiding a young woman's hair. It is hard not to find echoes of what happens there in the introductory paragraph of chapter six of Casa grande e senzala, entitled “The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian,”:

In our affections, our excessive mimicry, our Catholicism, which so delights the senses, our music, our gait, our speech, our cradle songs ­in everything that is a sincere expression of our lives, we almost all of us bear the mark of that influence. Of the female slave or “mammy” who rocked us to sleep. Who suckled us. Who fed us, mashing our food with her own hands. The influence of the old woman who told us our first tales of ghost and bicho. Of the mulatto girl who relieved us of our first bicho de pe. Who initiated us into physical love and, to the creaking of a canvas cot, gave us our first complete sensation of being a man. Of the Negro lad who was our first playmate. (Freyre 278)

“The female slave or ‘mammy’ who rocked us to sleep. Who suckled us. Who fed us, mashing our food with her own hands,” Freyre says. Looking at the watercolor, the list goes on: “the woman who bathed us”, “who combed our hair.” The images in the paragraph, like the watercolor, depict a childhood memory, which in the watercolor is manifested both in the scenes in the rooms (the women bathing and braiding the young masters) and in those outside the big house: a white boy torturing a Black one in the gallery of the senzala's, another boy killing a bird, others engaged in early sexual discoveries with a cow.   

Through a narrative based on the sweetened memories of the master's childhood in the big house under the care of Black wet nurses, Freyre imagines a Brazilian colonial past of cordial relations between the enslaved and the masters. It is around this perversely imagined cordiality of a childhood memory that Brazil builds its past on the plantation and the big house. It is from these distorted narrations9 of the childhood of the masters' that a certain contemporary sensibility of the plantation is created. A plantation imagined without conflict and without the horrors of slavery.  

This constructed dulcified sensibility around the plantation, which elsewhere I call a plantation sensoriality,10 does not only occur in relation to narrative or visual discourses, but it is part of a Brazilian national policy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, various social groups (including Black movements) demanded structural changes that would modify living conditions. In response to pressure from these groups,11 the government of Getúlio Vargas created symbols such as samba, feijoada, mulata, which aimed to resolve these conflicts by promoting the idea of a one, mestizo nation. Thus, it is formed the idea of a Brazilian nation born from harmonious relations in the plantation. Curiously, as Alexandre Bispo says: “At the same time that samba became a national symbol, candomblé houses suffered police repression, and capoeiristas were also considered delinquents, unemployed and dangerous in the eyes of the elites”.

5.

Brazilian historiography written over the last decades shows that the daily life of the enslaved women who took care of the master's children was far from the sweetened narration provided by Freyre. Although it is true that some of the enslaved women were bought to dedicate themselves exclusively to the care of children, it was not uncommon for many of them, some girls “as young as 13 or 15 years old,” “to perform domestic services such as washing, ironing, cleaning the house, besides taking care of the infants” (Machado). Torn away from their families, the lives of these women and girls were spent between the hellish conditions of colonial kitchens or the multiple demands of child rearing, in addition to the constant sexual abuse to which they were subjected by their masters, and the relatives or acquaintances of these masters. 

In a canonical essay, “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira”, Brazilian Black feminist Lélia Gonzalez analyzes the place of the Black woman in Brazilian cultural formation. According to Gonzalez, the Black woman appears in the myth of the Brazilian nation as the mulatta—queen of the Brazilian festival par excellence, the carnival, or as a domestic worker. Both the mulatta and the domestic worker have their origins in the figure of the maid/wet nurse of the big houses. The mulatta, a hypersexualized female subject, unveils and hides the daily sexual abuse within the big houses, and represents the overall sexual objectification of the maid. The domestic worker of today is the maid/wet nurse who, after the abolition of slavery, continues to be a domestic service provider, an inhabitant of the favelas, who suffers the extermination of her children, siblings, and grandchildren. A few decades before of what today we call the afterlife of slavery,12 Gonzalez writes: “it seems that we did not reach this state of affairs—understanding the precariousness, the genocide of Black people in Brazil—what the unfolding of the maid into the mulatta and domestic worker shows is that we never got out of it” (233).13

6.

However, they, these women and girls, imagined gaps, breaches. Or loopholes.  

At the beginning of her monograph Um pé na cozinha, Brazilian sociologist Taís Machado tells of the enslaved cook Esperança Garcia. In 1770, in what is now the Brazilian state of Piauí, Esperança Garcia, a maid-cook, wrote a letter to the governor of the captaincy of Piauí. In the letter, she told him that she had been transferred from the fazenda where she lived with her partner to her master's house to perform the duties of cook, and that she was having a very bad time there. She and her children were constantly beaten for no reason. In addition, her master did not observe the religious duties of Catholicism, as Esperança and her companions had not been to confession for more than three years, and one of her children and other enslaved children had not been baptized. She asked the governor to “cast his eyes upon her” so that she can be returned to the fazenda and have her daughter baptized (40).

Although we preserve few documents like Esperança's letter, it is clear that in the midst of hostile conditions, women like Esperança imagined ways to escape. Although the silences in the archive make impossible for us to know the outcome of the petition,14 in the letter Esperança recognizes herself as a subject with rights before the governor, “demands an end to the abuses, the right to practice her religion, and the reunification of her family” (40). We do not know the outcome of the case, but the petition is there, it was written, and it is as Machado says, a breach (41). And we can add: a gap, a loophole.

7.

After the burial of A Negra and the photographs of the wet nurses, Renata takes the red flowers from the wrapping and goes around distributing them to the Black women present in the room. Then, she takes off her white clothes, cleans herself with water from the clay jar and covers her body with the piece of green cloth that she had previously carried on her back. She takes one of the red flowers, plants it in the vase where the painting and the photographs are buried, and leaves the room. The Black women holding flowers, me among them, approach the vase and plant our flowers.

Remember the name: Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam serem amadas.

According to Renata's artist statement, “Axexê is an extremely complex funeral ceremony held for a deceased practitioner of Afro-indigenous religions, in which the ritual performed at the person's initiation is undone. In other words, the sacralized body is desacralized and this process includes the handing over of the deceased's personal belongings, which are then used in the cult, along with music, dances, consultation with Ifá, (…) baths, among other practices”. The performance, says Renata, “pays homage to and performs the spiritual disconnection of all the Black women who, during the colonial and imperial periods of Brazilian history, were the Black wet nurses of the white men and women of the Brazilian slave-owning elite”.

The performance, then, aims to detach (and if detaching is impossible, distancing) the women depicted in the painting and the photographs from the violence they have endured in life and in effect continue to endure ensnared in these various representations. To enact this detachment, it seems to me that the performance elaborates a series of gestures—walking with the images, burying the images, cleaning the body, sowing the flowers—that create (in the present of the gesture) a kind of gap, a breach, a loophole, to allow the rest of these women, to caress them and let them be caressed. And it is this gap, this breach, this loophole, that makes me think of time and space. In this gap, women who are, the attendants, encounter the women who were, the wet nurses. In this gap, women who are encounter each other in front of the vase, sowing, as a gesture of future. In this gap, past, present and future meet. As much as the gap is time, the gap is space. A space made through the gestures of the performance. The walking. The burials. The cleaning. The sowing.

This coming together of past, present, and future is also felt in what might be considered a certain doubt and ambiguity in the title of the performance. On the night of August 2018, when I attended, the title was “Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam serem amadas.” In more recent versions, the title changed to “Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam ser amadas”. To me, a non-native speaker of Portuguese, and someone who learned to speak the language on the street, in the first version of the title, “Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam serem amadas”, the conjugation of the verb “mereciam” in futuro pretérito attracted or pulled the “serem,” an attraction that was reflected in the shared agreement between the two (mereciam/serem), which gave me the impression that the sentence took place entirely in this futuro pretérito (a sort of future of the past).

In the most recent versions of the title, “Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam ser amadas,” the change to the infinitive, without marking of time or any other feature, seems to introduce a present tense into the sentence, which gives a sense of total time. These shifts leave us with a title that suggests future, past, and present; a title—a doubt—an ambiguity that, like Renata's performance, allows different temporalities to coexist.15

8.

I am thinking of the axexê, of Renata's performance, and of Leda Maria Martins, the Black Brazilian thinker and dancer who, in her book Performances do tempo espiralar, speaks of a time that “bends forward and backward at the same time, always in the process of prospection and retrospection, of simultaneous remembering and becoming” (Martins 23).

Martin's spiral time is not experienced in linear mechanics. Rather, it is “a place of inscription of a knowledge that is engraved in gesture, in movement, in choreography, on the surface of the skin, as well as in the rhythms and timbres of vocality” (Menezes 22). A time that is movement, body, gesture. Walking. Burying. Cleaning. Sowing.  

9.

I am thinking of the task urged by art historian Leslie King-Hammond, who, in the face of the abundant accounts of the plantation from the master class (Freyre, Tarsila do Amaral, the photographs), and in the face of that certain sensibility of a colonial past, invites us instead to think of “Black Spaces” in the plantation and their possibilities.16  

I am thinking of Trouillot, and of the borders, the edges of the plantation, and the detour as “social space and time” (202)—that life that the enslaved imagined on the borders, on the shores. I think of Brathwaite's inner plantation, its rhythms, the relations of compadrazgo. I am thinking of the plot, of what that tiny piece of soil suggests to Silvia Wynter, or as Édouard Glissant would call it, the Creole Garden, where so many different things were planted.

Through the movement, the gesture, the walk, the burials, Felinto's performance opens us up to a spiral time, to a time that contracts and expands, that goes back and forth. I suspect that in this spiral time it is possible to imagine “Black spaces” for these wet nurses, spaces that are gaps, loopholes. When we imagine them for those Black women, we also imagine them for ourselves.

10.

In our discussions in the spring of 2024, my students and I commented on the insistence with which so many contemporary Latin American visual artists return to the colonial past or the colonial archive. In the continuity of plantation and colonial violence over racialized communities in Latin America, the coming back to the colonial archive —that gesture— aims some kind of interruption to the violence. The violent repression that student movements experienced that spring was similarly rooted in colonial and state practices of violence.17Faced with such violence, students gathered outside of classrooms to imagine gaps, breach, loopholes. Their gestures reminded us of those of Latin American artists.

 In addition to Felinto, our conversations during that spring were filled with the works of Brazilian artists Rosana Paulino, Gê Viana, Natalia Marques, Dominican Firelei Baez or Haitian Tessa Mars. When I think and write and discuss Felinto's work with my students, I remember Natalia Marques. In her performance Melaço (2019, Center of Contemporary Arts-Ribeirão Preto), Marques appears completely dressed in layers of white clothing. She carries the tools of a cane cutter: a machete, a backpack with food containers, and foot and leg coverings. In front of the audience, she energetically sharpens a machete and then cuts a long cane stalk to form a triangular sculpture.

Marques' performance recovers a gesture—the sharpening of the machete—from the sugarcane field (notably a space rarely centered in the master's narratives of the plantation, such as in Freyre).18 The clothes she wears and the tools she uses remind us of working conditions in today's plantations. Through the gesture of sharpening, Marques points to the continuity of a labor that was and continues to be (and this is not a metaphor, since the state of São Paulo, where Marques was born, is today the main producer of sugar in Brazil).

In Marques' work, as in Felinto's, there is an attention to movement and gesture. Marques sharpens the machete and this gesture contains the spaces and times that makes up an everyday, an everyday that was and an everyday that is.19 This gesture of labor introduces the improbable. The gesture of sharpening the machete announces a past and presumes the infinite possibilities of a present that will be a future, a present that could be, for example, a revolt, like the Guariba revolt of 1984, in which dozens of sugar cane workers went on strike to demand better working conditions. Revolts are also gaps, breaches, loopholes.

11.

So I come back to Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam serem amadas, because I would like to close by thinking about how Felinto's gestures —the walk, the burial, the sowing— together with Marques' gestures, insist on a kind of language of gestures that is a language of the everyday, a language that makes us think about the life that happens, the life that is, and the always infinite possibilities of that life: the writing of a letter, hiding, sowing a flower. Felinto's gestures are not isolated, but connected to those of Marques, and to those of many other artists: an infinite aesthetic of gestures. These performances, which are gesture and movement, conjure women of the past to think about the conditions of women in the present, to point out continuities, but also to make us feel a present that is beyond itself, a spiral time that is and produces future. I will close—and open—with the humble and honest luminosity of some of the questions that my students asked during our conversations in that spring of 2024, a time filled with solidarity and generosity as much as it was with violence and destruction: to what probabilities do these performances—gesture, movement, space, time, gap, breach, loophole—lead us, what paths do they show us? How do we create fugues in the long durée of the plantation?20

Notes

 Works Cited

Albuquerque Jr., Durval M. A Invenção do Nordeste e outras artes. Editora Cortez, 2011.
Amancio, Kleber. Reflexões sobre a pintura de Arthur Timotheo da Costa. 2016. Universidade de São Paulo, PhD dissertation. Arrieta Fernández, Nohora Alejandra . Poéticas Amargas: Estéticas y Políticas de la Plantación de Azúcar en Brasil y el Caribe (1990‑2018). 2021. Georgetown University, PhD dissertation.
———. “Tiago Sant'Ana: Sensing the Sugar Plantation in Contemporary Brazilian Art.” Visual Afterlives of Enslavement, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Larissa Brewer-García, (manuscript).
“Axéxe da negra ou o descanso de todas as pretas que mereciam ser amadas.” Centro Cultural São Paulo, 15 Feb. 2023, www.centrocultural.sp.gov.br/axexe-da-negra-ou-o-descanso-de-todas-as-pretas-que-mereciam-ser-amadas/.
Bispo, Alexandre. “Mãe preta: memórias e monumentos negros.” O menelick 2º ato, www.omenelick2ato.com/historia-e-memoria/734.
Bittencourt, Renata. Modos de negra e modos de branca: o retrato “Baiana” e a imagem da mulher negra na arte do século XIX. 2025. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Master Thesis.
Braga‑Pinto, César. “José Lins do Rego sujeito aos ventos de Gilberto Freyre.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 30, no. 59, 2004, pp. 183‑203.
Brathwaite, Kamau. “Caribbean Man in Space and Time.” Savacou, vol. 11/12, 1975, pp. 1-11.
Cleveland, Kimberly. Black Women Slaves Who Nourished a Nation: Artistic Renderings of Black Wet Nurses of Brazil. Cambria Press, 2019.
Conduru, Roberto. “Alvo negro” in Casa de Purgar. 2018, Museu de Arte da Bahia, Salvador. 
Didion, Joan, “Los Angeles Notebook.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. 
Felinto, Renata. “Representação, representatividade e necropolítica nas artes visuais.” Modernismos 1922-2022, edited by Gênese Andrade, e-book, Companhia das Letras, 2022.
Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves. University of California Press, 1986. 
———. Casa Grande & Senzala: Formaçao da Familia Brasileira Sob o Regime da Economia Patriarcal. Global Editora, 2003.
Glissant, Édouard. El discurso antillano. Translated by Aura Boadas, Amerlia Hernández and Lourdes Rodríguez, Fondo editorial Casa de las América, 2010.
Gonzalez, Lélia. “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira.” Revista Ciências Sociais Hoje, Anpocs, no. 2, 1984, pp. 223-244. 
Hartmann, Saidiya. Lose your mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Kelley, Robin. “UCLA's unholy alliance.” Boston Review, 18 May 2024, www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/. 
King-Hammond, Leslie. “Identifying spaces of blackness: the aesthetics of resistance and identity in American plantation art.” Landscape of Slavery: the Plantation in American Art, edited by Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius, University of South Carolina Press, 2008, pp. 58-85.
Lopes, Fabiana and Araujo Bispo, Alexandre. “Presenças: a performance negra como corpo político.” Harper´s Bazaar Art, Apr. 2015, pp. 106-112.
Lopes, Fabiana. “Black Performance in Brazil: Hidden stories and the rough vibrancy of now.” Nka. Journal of Contemporary African Art, vol. 44, 2019, pp. 64-76.
Machado, Taís. Um pé na cozinha: um olhar sócio-histórico para o trabalho de cozinheiras negras no Brasil. e-book, Fósforo, 2022.
Marques, Natalia. Melaço. 2019, Center of Contemporary Arts, Ribeirão Preto.
Martins, Leda M. Performances do Tempo Espiralar: Poéticas do Corpo-Tela. Cobogó, 2021.
McKittrick, Katherine. "Plantation Futures." Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1-15. Project MUSE, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/532740.
———. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 12, no. 8, 2011, pp. 947–63. https://doi:10.1080/14649365.2011.624280.
Menezes, Hélio. “Coreografias do impossível. Encruzilhadas do tempo.” Coreografias do impossível, 35th São Paulo Biennial, 2023, pp.14-20.
Moura, Clóvis. Rebeliões da Senzala (1959). Mercado Aberto, 1988.
Paulino, Rosana. “Visualizing Blackness in Brazil.” Black Feminist Constellations, edited by Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu, Duke University Press, 2017, 225‑254.
Pinheiro, Bruno. Modernismo negro na Bahia: arte e relações raciais 1947-1964. 2023. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, PhD dissertation.
Rogers, Thomas. “The Environmental, Racial, and Class Worldview of the Brazilian Northeast´s Sugar Elite, 1880s-1930s.” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 46. No. 2, 2009, pp. 22-53.
Robinson, Cedric. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Black and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Rogers, Thomas. “The Environmental, Racial, and Class Worldview of the Brazilian Northeast´s Sugar Elite, 1880s-1930s.” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 46. No. 2, 2009, pp. 22-53.
Rugai Bastos, Elide. As criaturas de Prometeu: Gilberto Freyre e a Formação da Sociedade Brasileira. Global Editora, 2006.
Trouillot, Michel. Silencing the past. Power and the production of history. Beacon Press, 1995.
———. “Culture on the edges: Caribbean creolization in historical context.” From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures, edited by Brian Keith Axel, Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 189-210.
Vergara Figueroa, Aurora and Cosme Puntiel, Carmen Luz, editors. Demando mi libertad: mujeres negras y sus estrategias de resistencia en la Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Cuba, 1700-1800. Editorial Universidad ICESI, 2018.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History. Plot and Plantation.” Savacou, vol. 5, 1971, pp. 95-102.

QUOTE AS:
Nohora Arrieta Fernández. The performance of total time: rupturing violence’s long durée in gestures and gaps. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.4, July 2026. p. 147-161