Taypis of Racist Imaginaries and the (Ir)repairable in Denied Narratives of Black Women

Abstract

The racial and sexual oppression of Black Brazilian women is, as Lélia Gonzalez (2020) argues, one of the most perceptible yet consistently denied colonial legacies in the country. One of the myths perpetuating the erasure of Brazil's history of enslavement has established an official narrative portraying the nation as a racial paradise. However, when examining records of femicide, intimate partner violence and sexual abuse, it becomes evident that Black women are the most victimised. Faced with the impossibility of repairing the damage caused by the historical legacy of enslavement, which subjected Black women to multifaceted forms of violation, it falls upon us to eradicate all the structural conditions that perpetuate them as the primary targets of violence and dehumanisation. In this article, we delve into what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) describes as "taypi", a "middle-world" and an intermediate space where it is possible to witness the interaction between contrasting forms without the boundaries between them disappearing. These contact zones, however, can be permeated by violence when the opposites brought into contact are hierarchised by the colonial context, as Blacks, Indigenous and Whites were racialised in Brazil. Drawing inspiration from the displacements of times and spaces that are reinformed, the proposal of the taypis of racist imaginaries brings into contact images of racist erasures that, when evidenced through sociological methodology, point to Brazilian "racism by denial" (Gonzalez, 2020), present in national institutions, including journalism.