Rosana Paulino's 'Assentamento' as Black Feminist Geohistory

Lorraine Leu's essay in Afterall issue 55/56 'Out of Place' examines Rosana Paulino's lithograph series and installation 'Assentamento' (Settlement) as a Black feminist theory of place and archival production. Paulino confronts the trauma of slavery, focusing on Black women's labor of cognitive reorientation and bodily integrity. The work uses photographs from Louis Agassiz's 1865–66 Thayer Expedition to Brazil, now at Harvard's Peabody Museum, suturing the violated body back together. Paulino reimagines 'assentamento' as a sacred ground in Candomblé, a foundation, a land occupation, and a form of Black archival production. The installation includes the sea as calunga (the Atlantic crossing and cemetery) and quilombo (fugitive geographies). Paulino's 2016 artist's book '¿História Natural?' challenges nineteenth-century naturalist texts, exposing the necropolitical governance of positivist progress. The essay argues that Paulino's work historicizes the ongoing negation of Black lives in Brazil, opposing official narratives of slavery as foundation of mestiço civilization. Paulino's 'Assentamento' offers a vision for Black reimagining and remaking of society, centering insubordinate geohistories of the Americas.