Amefricanity as a Political-Cultural Category

Treating America as another name for the United States, or Latin America as culturally European by default, can leave people on a map while excluding them from the language that explains it. In this Portuguese essay published in Tempo Brasileiro in 1988, Lélia Gonzalez proposes amefricanidade, or amefricanity. More than a new label for an existing identity, the term asks that histories created by African-descended people in the Americas reorganize accounts of cultural belonging and intellectual authority.

This is a theoretical essay working through cultural examples, historical comparisons and psychoanalytic concepts, rather than a population survey. It moves from Brazilian language and racial ordering to the Caribbean and the wider Black diaspora, then returns to the politics of naming. Its question is not which culture is purest. It asks whose creations become national traditions while their creators remain excluded from interpreting them.

Disavowing racism can sustain racial order

In the second section, Gonzalez distinguishes overt segregation from racismo por denegação, racism operating through disavowal. The latter need not announce that Black people do not belong to the nation. It can celebrate mixture, assimilation and racial harmony while making white values, appearances and conduct the measure of recognition. Declaring everyone compatriots can conceal the hierarchy that remains among them.

Whitening is therefore not a neutral cultural exchange. It makes subordination appear to follow from distance from a white norm, and proximity to that norm look like individual advancement. Gonzalez compares identity formation and Black movements under different regimes to explain distinct political difficulties created by explicit exclusion and apparent integration. This does not make segregation desirable or establish a timeless division between overt US racism and covert Latin American racism. Different mechanisms can coexist within one society.

Accepting culture without recognizing its creators

Language offers a concrete route. Gonzalez calls African traces in Brazilian Portuguese pretoguês and extends her attention to Caribbean speech, music, dance and belief. National culture is not a European form transplanted intact. Yet classifying its transformations as folklore or national tradition can conceal their makers and histories. Incorporation into the nation does not automatically give those people equal authority over cultural interpretation.

The essay also examines bodies divided into objects of desire, using Brazilian sexual fantasies about buttocks and their vocabulary. Its psychoanalytic account of a partial object distinguishes intense attention to a body part from recognition of a person entitled to speak. This is not a claim that sexual desire is immoral. It places cultural fascination beside social devaluation: enjoying a bodily image can coexist with denying someone’s knowledge, labor and dignity.

These threads receive a more specific feminist development in Gonzalez’s earlier Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture. The sexualized carnival figure, everyday domestic worker and Black maternal caregiver are not unrelated symbols. Cultural producers perform work without necessarily controlling its conditions or their own representation. The essays illuminate one another, but the continental scale of the 1988 argument cannot replace an analysis of gendered labor.

Collective naming is not a search for pure origins

Amefricanity crosses an intellectual field divided by borders, colonial languages and US-centered narratives. The Caribbean should not be an appendix to American history, nor should the Black diaspora refer only to the United States. Gonzalez criticizes habitual names that let one country stand for a continent. This can prompt scrutiny of intellectual geography without becoming a command that everyone abandon their self-identification. A political category can open connections rather than prescribe the only legitimate name.

She also distinguishes diasporic experience from an idealized Africa. Visitors seeking African cultural survivals in Salvador supply a sharp example: searching only for preserved old forms can miss ongoing local creation. Historical connection is not denied. What is challenged is turning living people into a museum proving an external origin. Adaptation, resistance, reinterpretation and invention are constitutive processes, rather than departures from authentic culture.

Not every historical inference in the essay is secured by the political category. Gonzalez invokes Van Sertima’s claim of African influence on pre-Columbian Olmec culture; that origin thesis later received a dedicated archaeological critique. Challenging Eurocentrism does not require accepting an unestablished alternative diffusion story. Distinguishing political self-naming from proof of origins also helps protect Indigenous histories from disappearing in another group’s recognition.

As a reading and coalition-building tool, amefricanity brings separated cultural practices, labor and struggles into one field of attention. Its corresponding risk is that a new collective identity can also make differences recede. Returning to Gonzalez’s 1984 essay sharpens the question: after belonging is affirmed, who still supplies care, who controls interpretation, and whose speech is judged improper? Redrawing the map and changing its internal relations of power must proceed together.