Discusses how ephemeral artifacts of daily material culture, such as marquillas -- the colorful lithographed papers that were used to wrap bundles of cigarettes during the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba -- partook of the symbolization of emergent forms of racialized governability towards the end of slavery on the island.
This essay examines the classic short documentary that introduced the quilombo to Brazilian Cinema. Aruanda (Linduarte Noronha, 1960) is about a rural community of descendants of escaped slaves. The film represents an anti-culturalist approach to the quilombo that was soon superseded by the culturalist appropriation of the quilombo by the Brazilian black movement, by filmmakers like Carlos Diegues, and later, by the Brazilian state. Aruanda locates the utopian element of the quilombo, not in a peculiarly African or Afro-Brazilian culture, but in the unalienated life-activity of its members.
