Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage: mapping issues within Visual Arts

Abstract

This article aims to map issues regarding the recognition of the Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage related to Visual Arts. The research fi eld that connects Africa, Brazil and cultural heritage is imprecise, open to multiple approaches. Through a cartographic research, it indicates the historical foundations that cross the solid - and tense, discussion around the category Afro-Brazilian art and the recognition of this artistic patrimony in the 20th century. It identifi es the Afro-Brazilian heritage as a set of diverse practices, produced or not by Afrodescendants, that ethically and aesthetically problematize the African cultural matrices and/or the social condition of Afro-descendants. It concludes that this patrimony has undergone a process of constraint, which is perpetuated in anachronistic discriminatory practices, resulted from the whitening project of the Brazilian nation. Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage begins and ends in people and their practices, in the ranges of the commonalities that recreate it here and now.