Decolonising the Library: Anti-Blackness and Representation in Brazil

Osmundo Pinho's essay, published by Afterall in 2021, examines the anti-Black foundations of representation and the library as a colonial institution. Pinho reflects on his childhood reading of Monteiro Lobato's children's books, which he loved despite their racism, illustrating the contradictory subjectivation of Black readers. He argues that representation is a prison, citing Derrida and Tavia Nyong'o, and contrasts Lobato with writer Carolina Maria de Jesus, who wrote from extreme poverty. Pinho teaches at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB) in Cachoeira, Bahia, the Blackest state in Brazil, where affirmative action has brought Black and poor students into universities, sparking demands for decolonisation. He questions whether to abandon canonical authors like Lobato, Marx, Foucault, Mbembe, and Fanon, and advocates for a new relationship with writing beyond representational captivity, drawing on Black diasporic traditions and the concept of Améfrica Ladina. The essay concludes with a utopian horizon of liberation from representation, referencing the medieval poem 'Dies irae.'