Guerreiro Ramos: a powerful Brazilian decolonial thought in the 50s and 60s of the 20th century

Abstract

Guerreiro Ramos exposes the epistemic racism / sexism of the social sciences in Brazil when he objectifies the Brazilian black, constructs and presents him as a static, exotic, mummified, problematic human. Thus, it makes a potent criticism of the epistemic violence of the social sciences in Brazil with black women and black Brazilians, defending a sociological thinking from Brazil, committed to the emancipation of the black Brazilian population and of Brazilian society. His intellectual project was to criticize epistemological coloniality and to think about the decoloniality of Brazilian social sciences that had, until then, objectified, fixed and stereotyped black women and black men. At the same time, he argues that the decolonization / decoloniality of studies on blacks in Brazil was already underway not in Brazilian academic-intellectual life, but in black activism. This highlights the decolonial / decolonizing potential of the critique of Brazilian black activism through the presentation of the black organization Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), founded by activist Abdias do Nascimento, in the mid-1940s. For this effectively decolonial epistemology of Guerreiro Ramos produced in the mid 40s and 50s, we defend that he be taken as the founder of decolonial studies in Brazil and Latin America.