“Um negro de outro mundo” : cidadania e identidade no “retorno” a África de Raymundo Souza Dantas (1961—1974)

Abstract

This thesis aims to understanding the interventions of Raymundo Souza Dantas, a writer, journalist, and the first black Brazilian ambassador, in the political and intellectual scenario of Brazil between 1960 and 1974. In this regard, I regard Souza Dantas's formulations as influenced by traditions of African and black diasporic thought, constructed through Atlantic dialogues. I emphasize the way he mobilizes the tradition of return, one of the discourses invoked to comprehend the relationship between the black peoples of the diaspora and the African continent, aiming to provide responses to a Brazilian context undergoing profound political and social changes. In the face of this conjunction, I underscore the ambivalences in the way of the author manages the concept of return, for it is simultaneously used to offer critique and support to a state rhetoric marked by the use of racial democracy as a key to interpreting the Brazilian racial configuration. Drawing from a documentary corpus consisting of texts, works, and published interviews, as well as an unpublished collection from his personal archive, it was possible to draw an intellectual profile of Souza Dantas. The analysis explores how the author's process of identity construction is connects to his experience on the African continent as an ambassador. From this connection arise the formulations that guide the reflections of this study: the "black man from another world" and the "black Brazilian," ideas created to comprehend and position oneself in response to discourses establishing proximity between culture/identity and politics/citizenship in the context of the gestation of Brazil’s foreign policy for Africa. Through this analysis, it became possible to identify and highlight the particularities of Raymundo Souza Dantas's thought, positioning him as a black intellectual whose interventions provide perspectives to understand the relationships established between citizenship and identity in Brazil in the second half of the 20th century.