Wandering ghosts: images of slavery in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

In this paper, I intend to articulate a certain notion of ghost with a determinate conception of image in order to think about the returns or recurrences, in contemporary Brazil, of ideas and practices of the time when slave trade was permitted in the country. More specifically, I will analyze images and discourses that point to continuities or that gather traces of slavery in actual Brazil. To
do so, I depart from the print Negros in the cellar of a slave boat, by Johann Moritz Rugendas (1803-1858), one of the most popular representation of the ships that crossed the Atlantic, between 16th and 19th centuries, taking Africans to be enslaved in the Americas. The goal is to observe, through this and other images as well as discursive formations and Brazilian popular songs, how ghosts of slavery still haunt Brazilian society. For Trouillot (1995), slavery is at once a passed time and a living presence. A past that
returns to the present not as a simple copy, but as difference and repetition. Ghosts, in turn, can be understood as hauntings that remind us that what seemed to be pacified and overcome is alive and its returns sometimes happen in intangible ways (Pile 2005, Gordon 2008). With that in mind, I ask: in what images or discourses of today can the Rugendas’ print persist? What traces, more or less tangible, the 19th-century slave ships have left in the present?