Black Masculinities in the Visual Arts: contemporary performances and their narratives of discomfort, escape, and fabulation

Abstract

In the debate on black masculinities, it is understood that black men are historically reduced being depicted as controlling , based on imaginaries at the service of coloniality and the racial device. However, there is the emergence of important artistic performance practices in the construction of re-signification strategies, seeking to question the racialized regime of representation and proposing new ways of fabulating the body and subjectivities of the black man. This work analyzes how the performances of contemporary artists Antonio Obá and Tiago Sant’Ana seek counter-narrative strategies to challenge representational symbolic artifacts. Their works present the black male body inscribed as a fictional tactic of resistance in race and gender.

Keywords
black masculinities; performance; escape; resistances