Rostos pintados de preto – algumas reflexões iniciais

Abstract

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici mobilized these two characters from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, from 1610-11, because she was interested in the relationships between the “Witch Hunt” and the discovery of the New World. So, also thinking about colonial issues, especially from the nautical imaginary that this piece moves, with the pitch and tar, I head to the Neptune’s Party, which takes place on board a ship, passing through the Equator, in the middle from the contemporary Brazilian novel Opisanie Świata, by Veronica Stigger. And I try to elaborate some initial reflections on faces that were painted black, with grease and pitch. As this party was about the “Rite of passage across the Equator”, I present the reading that the historian Jaime Rodrigues made of reports of this ritual, using the morphological method of Ginzburg, who studied the “Witch Hunt”. Thus, I seek to discuss, from a critical perspective, the “stained” face, since pitch and tar were used in Europe, at least since the 12th century, as an element of punishment and public torture, and I think in these signs to collect stories of “breu” [pitch/tar] and what I call “breu$il”, signifiers that I relate to racism in Brazil.