Body, memory and fashion

the afro-brazilian fashion as resistence

Abstract

Over the last few decades, we have observed that much of contemporary culture is organized around memory. In another words, we noticed the evidence of past events in many everyday spaces. While in the past we understood more institutionalized spaces as possible for the activity of memory, today, media, the Internet, mobile devices, and fashion can serve as spaces, with varying degrees of relationship to the pasts, as well as enabling the construction of a historical culture based on reflective effort. This behavior is a consequence of a specific temporality and a particular behavior, which we call the Ethical-Political Turn, described by historian Marcelo Rangel. So, we seek to explore here how Afro-Brazilian fashion is part of this cultural mobilization that highlights the past, as well as an ethical-political behavior common to the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. To achieve this, we will use Andreas Huyssen's description of contemporary temporality, as well as Neusa Santos' thought, to define the constitution of Brazilian culture concerning the Black body. Our goal is to demonstrate how fashion serves as a space for the construction of identities and memory.