Trabalhos aprovados 2026

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Proponente

Afi Venessa Appiah (NYU)

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Afi Venessa Appiah is a PhD candidate in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts (MA, Carleton University). Her research advocates for eroticism as an essential yet overlooked lens in African cinematic studies. Her dissertation examines representations of sexuality, the erotic, and the semi-nude Black form in African and diasporic cinema, tracing how filmmakers redefine the Black female body from wounded signifier to vessel of liberation.

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Título

Tempo Espiralar: Erotic Counter-Archives in African and Black Brazilian Diasporic Cinema

Resumo

This paper reads eros as a fugitive counter-archival practice in Sub-Saharan African cinema, tracing how filmmakers encoded desire through opacity, off-frame ellipsis, and ritual transmission; what the author terms “dual restraint”, resisting both colonial ethnographic capture and postcolonial moral regulation. The paper extends this framework to Black Brazilian cinema, revealing a diasporic spiral in which African erotic counter-archives return and are rearticulated across the Atlantic.

Resumo expandido

Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s “opacity”, Audre Lorde’s erotic epistemology, Alexie Tcheuyap’s notion of “le sexe hors cadre”, and Christian Metz’s imaginary economy of spectatorship, the paper traces how African filmmakers encoded desire through atmosphere, silence, symbolic substitution, oral circulation, and ritual choreography. Across a corpus including Timité Bassori’s “Sur la Dune de la Solitude” (1964), Ousmane Sembène’s “La Noire de…” (1966) and “Ceddo” (1977), Djibril Diop Mambéty’s “Touki Bouki” (1973), Désiré Écaré’s “Visages de Femmes” (1985), Sarah Maldoror’s “Sambizanga” (1972), and Souleymane Cissé’s “Finyé” (1982), among others, the paper identifies four registers of erotic counter-archival practice: off-frame eros (le sexe hors cadre), the psychic displaced geography of diasporic desire, oral economies of eros, and cosmological and insurgent erotic records.

The paper’s intervention lies in repositioning eros as an African mode of film-theoretical discourse; a counter-archive that shelters sacred and communal sexual knowledge from spectacular regimes of bodily availability. Rather than a simple register of censorship, dual restraint constitutes an epistemology of care: what must circulate obliquely through ellipsis, metaphor, secrecy, and imaginative reconstruction, preserving erotic knowledge without surrendering it to colonial or pornographic regimes.

In its second movement, the paper extends this framework transatlantically through Leda Maria Martins’s concept of tempo espiralar; the diasporic temporality in which suppressed histories do not disappear but return, rearticulated across generations. The erotic counter-archives of African cinema resurface, transformed, in Black Brazilian filmmaking. In Zózimo Bulbul’s “Alma no Olho” (1973), the Black body performs a wordless pantomime of Africa. Désiré and selfhood are encoded through gesture and silence alone, the body itself the only record. In Glauber Rocha’s “Barravento” (1962), set on the Bahian coast, Candomblé ritual organizes erotic life as cosmological obligation; bodies governed by Orixás, intimacy inscribed through sacred choreography and ancestral law, rhyming precisely with the ceremonial erotic registers of Sembène’s “Ceddo” and Cissé’s “Yeelen”. In Adélia Sampaio’s “Amor Maldito” (1984), melodrama restores affective interiority to a subject juridically criminalized for her desire, reconstituting testimony where the courtroom forecloses it. And in Yasmin Thayná’s “Kbela” (2015), the Black body is reclaimed from colonial inscription as an ancestral and erotic act that stages the “pleasure turn” (Diabate) that Écaré’s Affoué and Sembène’s Diouana could only gesture toward off-frame.

Reading these traditions together reveals a diasporic spiral: a shared fugitive epistemology of erotic record-making that migrates across the Atlantic, adapting to new conditions of racial and gendered dispossession while preserving its core refusal: the insistence that some things must remain off-frame to live. This paper thus proposes tempo espiralar as a theoretical bridge between African and Black Brazilian cinema studies, and dual restraint as a framework that names a Black diasporic aesthetic philosophy preceding and exceeding both national film histories.

Bibliografia

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