“África Arte Negra” in Brazil

Abstract

This essay examines África arte Negra, a major exhibition of over 750 African artworks that traveled to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília from 1969 to 1970. Organized by Henri Senghor, independent Senegal’s first ambassador to Brazil, in collaboration with both Senegalese and Brazilian officials and curators, the exhibition became a site of debate about Brazil’s national identity and definitions of art, presenting an idea of Africa through the art of numerous ethnic communities on the continent. The exhibition articulated independent Senegal’s theory of Négritude, broadly defined as an anticolonial intellectual movement promoting African and diasporic culture and solidarities as well as global Black consciousness, which clashed with Brazil’s rhetoric of racial democracy. Yet the exhibition, I argue, mended these competing discourses for the sake of diplomacy, creating bridges grounded in African art and the history of exchange between West Africa and Brazil.