Black invisibility: reframing diasporic visual cultures and racial codes in Bahia

ABSTRACT This article discusses Black invisibility to examine Afro-diasporic visual cultures that are grounded in Black people’s material conditions. As a conceptual and empirical tool, it turns to the Black subjects and their visual representations that remain invisible by diasporic yearnings for an essentialist African in conjunction with societies’ dependence upon race as a visual signifier to naturalize ideologies and structures of racial, classed, and gendered domination. This reroutes diasporic connectivities to particular conditions, spaces, and politics of Black people that must contend with both Black people’s conditions and the processes that emerge from the exigencies of Black sociopolitical life. To do so, this article analyzes performance artist Tiago Sant’ana’s ‘Apagamento #1’ and Baiana System’s ‘Invisível’ in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a city acclaimed for its ‘authentic’ African culturalisms and supposedly romantic race relations. Both Sant’ana and Baiana System illustrate how Black invisibility uses visual cultures to deconstruct and critique the master codes of race in the diaspora.