The Edgar Leuenroth Archive (AEL) at Unicamp should become the space with the largest documentation gathered on Brazilian black protagonism. Committed to being an anti-racist archive, AEL has received, in the last three years, 13 collections from organizations, intellectuals and activists from the black movement. In the month dedicated to Black Consciousness, the directors and staff of the Archive take stock of the project around the preservation of black memory, called Afro Memória.
“The idea initially was to cover the period of the last 50 years of black organizations, associations and intellectuals in Brazil, from the 1970s generation to now, but the scope expanded. There is no other place that brings together such a vast and large collection. With the arrival of 13 collections, Unicamp positions itself in a prominent place in the preservation of black memory in Brazil”, observes the deputy director of AEL, Mário Medeiros.
The work of preserving, recovering and making the material available is the result of a partnership between AEL, the Center for Research and Training in Race, Gender and Social Justice of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) and the Hip Hop in Transit research line from the Migration Study Center of the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences at Unicamp (IFCH).
The collections received by AEL are documentation from: Reginaldo Bispo and Margarida Barbosa (Movimento Negro Unificado - SP), Milton Barbosa (Movimento Negro Unificado - SP), Geledés Instituto da Mulher Negra, Januário Garcia, Soweto Organização Negra, King Nino Brown, Alexandre de Maio, Chico Piauí and Jacira da Silva (Unified Black Movement -DF), Estevão Maya-Maya, José Correia Leite, Quilombhoje, Azoilda Trindade, Center for the Study of Labor Relations and Inequality (CEERT).
Documentation illustrates plurality of action
Medeiros says that, when diving into the collection, one has an overview of the activities of the black movement from the 1920s and 1930s, through black press newspapers, for example, up to the present day. “Firstly, material arrived from Milton Barbosa and Reginaldo Bispo, relating to the Unified Black Movement, which show a moment in the history of black organizations in the context of the 1978 generation, of a more intense fight against police violence and against racism. From the 1980s, material from Geledés arrived, from the struggle of black women, from black feminism, with an international presence”, he says.
With the Soweto collection, the professor continues, it is possible to perceive a new agenda of struggles from the 1980s and 1990s and the articulation in marches, such as the Marcha Zumbi dos Palmares. The documentation by Nino Brown and Estevão Maya-Maya makes it possible to delve into the history of music led by black people and the international connection through cultural expression. In this way, each collection offers a range of possibilities for analyzing Afro-Brazilian protagonism.
“When these materials are disseminated, they gain a truly impressive level of public knowledge. Therefore, the role of the university in safeguarding and allowing access to this set of different networks of the black movement is very important”, assesses Medeiros.
The director of AEL, Aldair Rodrigues, also highlights that, when gathered, the documentation makes it easier for researchers to understand the connections between the movement's strands. “It is possible to access a multiplicity of perspectives, because the black experience is not monolithic. It is possible to observe conflicts, articulations and different views on the same political process and track them. Gathering all this documentation brings a huge advantage.”
For him, Unicamp plays a fundamental political role in constituting the collection. “The State does not have a memory policy that includes the black population. In fact, there is the policy of forgetting, which this project tries to reverse.”
Project is aligned with affirmative actions
Rodrigues also highlights the project's alignment with affirmative action policies, which increased the presence of black students at Unicamp. “It is a collective effort to reposition the archive, thinking that documentation enables the production of knowledge centered on black protagonism. And, more than that, it has a role in helping black students who are entering university to recognize themselves,” he says.
For the professor, with Afro Memória, Unicamp reaffirms the experience of the black population as fundamental to understanding the country's history, contributing to rethinking the way in which knowledge is constructed at the university.
“These collections and the research that can be done from them can help us change curricula and subject syllabuses, to produce references centered on black protagonism. It is an attempt to contribute to the implementation of the epistemological dimension of affirmative actions, because it is not enough to just place black students within the university, it is necessary to provoke a transformation of practices linked to the production of knowledge.”
Furthermore, both affirmative actions and documentation produced by black people converge “in the possibility of rewriting the history of Brazil from the black population in the first person”.
“Normally, what we have at universities are white people talking about the black population. This documentation brings black voices in the first person, which offers an important change in the way we understand the history of Brazil and the history of democracy, which is not possible without seeing the struggles of black movements for rights”, he concludes.
Collections contribute to the training of students
All documentation that arrives at AEL must go through a process of cleaning, restoration, cataloguing, evaluation and digitization. It is a meticulous work that counts on the dedication of both staff and scholarship students. Matheus dos Santos is one of them. A History student, he has been working on the Soweto collection and believes that the activities contribute to his education.
“In this work, we learned how to treat documents from the perspective of those who are archiving them. Activities with the collection provide a professional perspective for the historian on how to treat sources,” he states.
By dealing with documents on a daily basis and by the fact that he is beginning to study a topic related to black memory – capoeira in the 19th century –, Santos indicates the importance of the collection and the directions that his research could take with the analysis of the documentation.
“Here, we realize that the black movement, which we talk about in the singular, is actually plural, and because it is plural we also notice several divergences. With the collection, we managed to complicate the history of the black movement. Documentation helps us understand the strengthening of the black movement nationally and internationally. It is possible to analyze capoeira in events organized by movements, because most started with cultural events. One possibility would be to map the presence of culture in these political activities.”
Task force to make the collection public
All collections received are now available for consultation. The work to make documentation accessible, including online, begins with restoration, when necessary. This step is carried out by a technical and specialized team.
“With this work, we recovered documents with degradation damage, making research possible. All treatment is carried out with special materials, suitable for restoration and packaged in packaging made with neutral materials – hanging folders, polywave folders, polyester jackets and paper boxes made especially for the document. After restoration, the documents are stored in the collection area with temperature and unit control and parameters”, explains the person responsible for the Archive Preservation and Dissemination section, Castorina de Camargo.
After that, the documentation goes to a technical analysis, at which point the items are studied. In the Soweto collection, the person responsible for this analysis is Isabela Salgado. “We create an arrangement chart, which has already been presented to the organization for approval. This table becomes an inventory. When the researcher comes here, he will have access to what the collection has and what the research sources are”, he explains.
Finally, the collection materials are digitized. In the case of books, they are cataloged and made available in the Unicamp Library System. Maria Segnorelli is responsible for this process. She highlights the contributions of one of the collections she recently finished cataloging: that of Nino Brown, which includes around 350 book titles, most of them about hip hop and other musical styles led by black people. “I estimate that at least 80% of the titles are unpublished, so the collection added a lot to our base, demonstrating the gap within the collections on this topic.”
Segnorelli highlights that Brown's collection brought to Unicamp a previously non-existent descriptor at the base: “Afrofuturism”, a concept that refers to a future in which black men and women are protagonists in areas of power.
It is one of the examples of the contributions of the Afro Memória project to the dissemination of knowledge about the black population and which takes AEL to a new level. “There is a turning point in AEL, positioning it as a reference on the black issue. We have always presented ourselves as a reference in the history of work, the left, women, social movements in Brazil. But there was silence regarding the black population. This project goes down in the history of the Archive”, summarizes Maria Dutra, an AEL employee for 24 years.
The Afro Memória project has already published a notebook, dedicated to the documentary collection of Milton Barbosa – a historic militant Unified Black Movement (MNU). Access here.
The collection is also one of the bases for exhibitions, such as the Memories of the Future, at the Memorial da Resistência, in São Paulo (SP), curated by professor Mario Medeiros. The online catalog can be accessed here
