Feitiço Negro, Despachos Brancos Epistemologia do despacho e pedagogia anticolonial

Abstract

Black spell, white dispatches: Dispatch epistemology and anti-colonial pedagogy

Abstract: This article proposes a discussion on the Black-African resistance based on the “dispatch epistemology”. The approach is based on a genealogical and semantic analysis of the term dispatch in coexistence with another term in common use in the same initial period of the Portuguese colonial expansion: “feitiço” (spell). Dispatch is a legal-bureaucratic procedure that represents the presence of the King and the State beyond his body, producing mechanisms of racialization, dominance and control over colonized bodies. “Feitiço”, however, emerges as a Portuguese category used to refer to African amulets in Guinea and condemn them as objects that have been “made”, that is those which did not have metaphysical truth. The condemnation of African “spells” is complementary to the consolidation of the colonial state's legal-bureaucratic orders. This complementarity between dispatch and “spell” as a colonial executor is resized in the period of post-abolition in Brazil, when the category “dispatch”, previously restricted to the bureaucratic field, is reframed by black knowledge as an agency of a living and community corporality. In dialogue with the principles of “crossroads pedagogy”, the “dispatch epistemology” proposes a way to think and activate this living corporeality and strengthen the exchange of black knowledge in discussions about education in Brazil.