Race, corporality and subjectivity in Beatriz Nascimento and Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira

Abstract

The article analyzes the epistemological propositions on race, corporality and subjectivity in the theoretical works of historian Beatriz Nascimento and sociologist Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira in their disciplinary fields, between 1970 and 1990s. The article aims, therefore, to open empirical paths in the genealogy of social thought and history of historiography to the racial dimension of the production of knowledge in History and Social Sciences in Brazil. Considering the historicity of the debate about social markers of identity and places of speech, the text considers that the two authors established the foundations of a theoretical project for the study of the Brazilian Black experience fraught with problematizations about the political injunctions between the production of sociological and historiographical discourses and the racial identity of the researcher’s social figure. In conclusion, this project established epistemological emancipation as a political principle for the elaboration of alternative conceptions of scientific objectivity based on ethnic and race intersections.