Performing Racial Democracy as Erotic Fantasy

Abstract: This essay reads O Samba do crioulo doido, a solo performance by queer Afro-Brazilian artist Luiz de Abreu, as a theorization of how Brazil’s myth of racial democracy operates as an erotic fantasy grounded in Black subjection. The performance unsettles Brazil’s ideology of racial neutrality and its sadomasochistic disavowal of the violence that subtends the production of Blackness. By probing the nation’s familiar lust for Black flesh and gesturing toward quite different Black queer desires, O Samba corrodes the narrative of racial democracy—which sutures Brazilian representations of the nation and its subjects— while choreographing the radical possibilities of transient Black pleasures.