Metamorfoses negras: desfazendo sortilégios visuais do mundo ocidental

Abstract

It reflects on hegemonic visions that, since the first imaginary elaborations of a possible Western world in the fourth century BC, distorted the image of African peoples and supported colonization processes under this aegis of thought. Africa(s), Africans, descendants. There is a world fascinated for millennia by another. This fascinated and imagined world, the West, explored and took over the narrative about several other worlds, faded, erased, reinterpreted by European memory, whether through territorial outlines or historical narrative. The Western thus contrasted with the Eastern, also faded. What are East and West? Just as there is no race, but there is racism, perhaps there are no Wests and Easts, but Westernisms and Orientalisms. It is worth asking: beneath these imaginaries, where is Africa(s), which is located and lost among the elaborate “isms”, in a place contrary to the idea of civilization, of non-West, of non-East, of “a non place"? This imagined Africa bewitches the West and at the same time is metamorphosed by it. The novel The Golden Ass, by the African Apuleius (2nd century AD), will serve as a pretext for reflection on this metamorphosis.