Black Cinema in Brazil: Rethinking Authorship and Agency

FAIN: FT-279061-21

Leslie Louise Marsh
Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA 30303-3011)

Research and writing of a book on Afro-Brazilian Cinema from the 1960s to the present.

I submit my project, “Black Cinema in Brazil: Rethinking Authorship and Agency” to be considered for support by the NEH. In this monograph, I examine the history of Black Brazilians in audiovisual production and trace changing ideas of race and cultural identity in Brazil. I seek support to complete chapter 2 of this film historiography. In chapter 2, I examine the work of Zózimo Bulbul (1937-2013), who acted in Cinema Novo films before becoming the first Black Brazilian to direct a film. He later advocated for Pan-African film, cinema negro (Black Cinema), and inspired a new generation of Black Brazilian artists. I analyze how Bulbul shaped Afro-Brazilian representation and his significant contributions to Afro-Brazilian intellectual history. This project contributes a humanistic study to a growing body of scholarship on Black Brazilians in the social sciences and will interest scholars of Brazil, Latin America, Latin American Cinemas, Pan-African Cinemas, and the African Diaspora.