Concretism’s Dissonant Objects

Abstract This article examines the legacy of Brazilian concretism, as well as a global aesthetics of concretism, and their poetics that claim to liberate the object. Specifically, it analyzes the contemporary Black Brazilian poet Ricardo Aleixo and one of his interlocutors, the “outsider” artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário, as dialoguing with the inheritance of concretism in Brazil, as well as the movement’s elision of the role of the transatlantic slave trade in its celebration of the “object” itself. Following Fred Moten’s reading of the “resistance of the object” and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s philosophy of the analytics of raciality, the article suggests that Aleixo’s work is not only “inspired” by Brazilian concretism but theorizes the relationship between objecthood, performance, and materiality with a focus on the conflicts between concrete poetics and Black Brazilian cultural production. Thus Aleixo points to an analytics of raciality and exclusion underpinning concretism and the Euro-avant-garde. The article’s author reads Aleixo’s “Poemanto” (“Poemantle”) and the poem “Essay/Rehearsal for Writing (with) the Body” as critiquing Brazilian concretism’s aesthetics of the “object” by advancing an experimental poetics that questions the limits of objectivity, legibility, and representation with regard to cultural and political myths of racial democracy and Blackness in Brazil and beyond.