Amefricanity The black feminism of Lélia Gonzalez Raquel Barreto Though a quarter of the total population, black women represent just 2% of the legislative body of Brazil’s federal government, the National Congress. Yet their visibility in public debate has grown radically in recent years with younger activists beginning to occupy spaces in media, academia and the arts. Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994) has become a major point of reference for this new gener- ation, and not only because of her pioneering position as a black woman intellectual in the 70s and 80s, or the example set by her political commitments and engage- ments. It is also because her thought foreshadowed con- temporary debates concerning race relations in Brazil and beyond. Bolsonaro’s Brazil is in many ways stuck at a crossroads between such processes of social transform- ation and political forces determined to stop them at all costs. Gonzalez took the experience of black people in Brazil as the point from which to articulate an original perspective on the country’s formation that both con- tested and resituated offcial accounts. She drew both from Marxism, in order to understand the implantation and development of capitalism in the colonial Americas, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to interpret a national un- conscious revealed in cultural and linguistic elements im- printed by colonialism and the disavowal of African and indigenous origins. She brought together the disavowed experiences of African descendants and indigenous into a single category – Amefricanity – which questioned the ‘Latin’ identity that suppressed both, thereby offering a contribution avant la lettre to the conversation on deco- loniality taking place today. In her insistence on always thinking race, class and gender in relation, she not only was an early practitioner of what would become known as ‘intersectionality’, but she laid the basis for a black feminism in Brazil – a facet of her work so infuential now as to risk overshadowing the rest. It is as a tribute to Gonzalez’s ongoing relevance and her rediscovery today that this paper uses her trajectory to comment on the continuities and discontinuities between two disparate moments in the history of Brazil and the struggle for social and racial justice. Trouble in paradise Born Lélia Almeida on 1 February 1935 in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, she was the pen- ultimate daughter of a large family with few economic resources. Her father died when she was a child; her mother, of indigenous descent, was a domestic worker. Brazilian society imposes a marked racial and sexual di- vision of domestic labour: not only do women perform it almost exclusively, but poor black women often do it in the homes of wealthier white families. 1 Like many in her position, Gonzalez began her professional life as a nanny, though she managed to break with the path laid out for her by fnishing her studies and attending university. As she would later recall: ‘The only way I found to overcome these problems was to be the frst student in the class. We all know the story: ”she’s black but she’s smart”’. 2 She studied History and Geography and then Philosophy at what is today the State University of Rio de Janeiro, teaching at several colleges and higher education insti- tutions. In the late 1970s, Gonzales became one of the few black lecturers at the Pontifcal Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where she worked until the end of her life. Gonzalez’s trajectory personifed several of the changes taking place in the political, academic, artistic and cultural circuits of the 1970s and 80s. The spaces in which she circulated and the encounters she had en- capsulate the period. In the late 70s, while the military dictatorship began a slow thaw, the political and cultural RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.09 / Winter 2020-21 15