The Phenomenological Deficit of Critical Theory:

Recasting Afro-Brazilian Diasporic Identity

in Postcolonial Perspectives*

Abstract – We attempt to show that the black press in Brazil’s post-abolition

(in the last decade of the XIXth century and the first decades of the XXth ­century)
succeeded in making visible the struggles for recognition of black intellectuals
in their fight against racism and in their defense of inclusive education. In so
doing they close the phenomenological gap between third- and first-person
accounts of social liberation and political emancipation. By bringing together
contributions from critical theory (especially Jürgen Habermas) and cultural
studies (especially Stuart Hall), we recast Afro-Brazilian diasporic identity in
the framework of a postcolonial phenomenology of liberation. We argue for
social egalitarianism in race, gender, and cross-cultural studies so as to avoid
the pitfalls of positivistic historiography and subjectivist interpretations of the
lifeworld.
Keywords: critical theory, cultural studies, lifeworld, racism, slavery

Introduction
Although it is well known that Africa was the cradle of Homo sapiens
and that most mass migration and diasporic movements in the planet
began there, the normative challenges for African, Latin American, and
emerging democracies in the Anthropocene go well beyond birth con-
trol, environment-friendly industrialization, and liberal variants of sus-
tainable development (Mert 2019). We share Achille Mbembe’s view
that the history of capitalism is linked to the emergence of modernity,
colonization, and the ultimate exploitation of human life (Mbembe
2013, 28). On this basis, we argue for a postcolonial, critical theory of
liberation that does justice both to Amy Allen’s criticisms of a Euro­
centric idea of historical progress (Allen 2016) and to Axel Honneth’s
and Rainer Forst’s normative, reconstructive conceptions of recognition
and justification (Honneth 1995, Forst 2011). Allen’s and Honneth’s

* This article is an invited contribution.

Études phénoménologiques – Phenomenological Studies 5 (2021) 59-86.

© 2021 by Peeters Publishers. All rights reserved. doi : 10.2143/EPH.5.0.3288750
60 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

views succeed in closing the phenomenological gap between third- and

first-person accounts of social and political theories. In its attempt at
a dialectic of enlightenment that breaks away from the demonization of
the technological, instrumental domination of nature and society, the
Frankfurt School suffers from what has been called “the phenomenolog-
ical deficit of critical theory” (das phänomenologische Defizit der Kritischen
Theorie, De Oliveira 2009). This deficit consists, on the one hand, in
recasting an immanent, reconstructive critique of sociality with a view
to unveiling lifeworldly practices that resist systemic domination and, on
the other, in reifying normalization, without reducing the former to
self-referential stances of normativity or the latter to reified, naturalistic
machineries of social control (De Oliveira 2009). If the phenomeno­
logical correlation between system (System) and lifeworld (Lebenswelt)
lies at the very bottom of the normative grounds of social criticism, a
self-understanding of an Afro-Brazilian subjugated condition within
postcoloniality turns out to be an interesting instance of a normative
reconstruction of lifeworldly forms that constitute intersubjective, social
practices of resistance, resilience, and liberation. After all, since its begin-
nings in the first half of the last century, critical theory has sought to
overcome the positivist division of labor opposing empirical findings
in scientific endeavors (including the social sciences) to the normative
claims of the social world (including interpersonal and self-other relations).
We thus take for granted, from the outset, Horkheimer’s (1982, 246)
contention that critical theory is the only form of social philosophy or
political theory that does full justice to its critical thrust by denouncing
injustice, inequalities, and the negation of emancipatory claims within
the very social fabric of institutions, organizations, and human relations
overall, ultimately aiming at the “emancipation from slavery.”
It has been shown that Brazil received more African slaves than any
other country during the Atlantic slave trade era, from the XVIth through
the XIXth century. Some five million slaves from Africa were brought to
that land between 1501 and 1866, as Brazil was the last country in the
Western world to abolish slavery in 1888 (Conrad 1984; Russell-Wood
2002). The fate of racial relations in Brazil necessarily point to the
­violent slavery system that fed the feudal and mercantilist structures of
oppressive, colonial domination in that country for over four centuries
and led to the tremendous social and economic inequalities of the
present-­day unbridled capitalism (Cammack 1984). In fact, that Brazil
was accidentally “discovered” by the Portuguese in 1500, at a time when
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 61

the Italians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, English, German, and other

Europeans were sailing around and expanding their businesses overseas,
just attests to the interplay of contingencies that characterized global,
historical processes, and societal, civilizational formations (Schwarcz and
Starling 2018, 32f.). However, historical contexts cannot be taken for
granted nor any given idea of continuity or patterns of historical evolu-
tion, as if one existing set of institutional arrangements were to be
regarded as necessarily giving birth to another set. Since society is a social
artifact, a formative context might be evoked to explain the basis of
a certain set of institutional arrangements and their reliance upon each
other. Hence, we try to avoid resorting to deterministic analyses of
Marxist-inspired theories that tend to explain the abolition of slavery
simply in terms of economic, evolutionary shifts that move away from
slave labor towards liberal, market-oriented structures of work relations.
We also seek to rescue the first-personal, intersubjective accounts of
slaves’ and freed persons’ struggles for recognition. It is by resorting
to our transformative imagination that we can thus make sense of the
ongoing social and political problems in Brazil. Our interdisciplinary
research program takes into account both the complex historical and
cultural makeup of Brazilians, including their problematic modern quests
for cultural identities (especially Afro-Brazilian, indigenous, feminist,
queer, and hybrid identities), and the social, historical analyses that seek
to unveil their rationale combined with economic, legal, and political
variables.
In this essay, we argue for a Brazilian reception of critical theory
which seeks political emancipation by means of its social movements.
These movements aim at promoting several normative claims and forms
of liberation (landless and workers’ social movements, Afro-Brazilian,
feminist, and gay movements) and thus allow for the public justification
of political emancipation (what is best for Brazilian democracy) and
its normative reconstruction (how democracy has been constructed in
concrete, identity claims) (Rocha and Bezerra 2001). A Brazilian critical
theory of justice, as expected, is not drawn out of a theoretical hat, as in
an analytical thought-experiment. It arises out of the social reality of a
given, concrete society, which is a rather young democracy in its ongoing
process of democratization. Since its beginning over thirty years ago –
after two decades of military dictatorship, and following some five cen-
turies of a violent process of colonization and authoritarianism – this
process has reached its climax of internal divisions and polarization today
62 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

(De Oliveira, 2004). In fact, one cannot make sense of Brazilian current
inequalities without revisiting Brazilian political history, which was pro-
foundly marked by systematic authoritarianism and by over four centu-
ries of slavery (Schwarcz and Starling 2018).

The Quest for Social Liberation in Brazil

Theoretically speaking, liberation was not only contemporaneous
with Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective accounts of public justification
– we may recall the annus mirabilis 1971, when both A Theory of Justice
and A Theology of Liberation came out. Liberation can also be recast as
the political correlate of a critical-theoretical normative reconstruction
of a social ethos and demos in their respective struggles for social justice
and the social inclusion of African-Americans and Afro-Brazilians (Marx
2012). To be sure, while in the post-Jim Crow US, liberal democracy
was beginning to implement affirmative action, Brazilian civil society
was resisting a military dictatorship which resorted to the national
­ideology of racial democracy as a cover-up for its institutional oppres-
sion (Stanley 2018, 732). The task for an Afro-Brazilian critical theory
of justice did start with grassroots struggles for recognition (Darby
2009), particularly in social movements which became prominent by
their dramatic debunking of the ideology of racial democracy, which
permeated many conservative and status quo agendas of authoritarian
domination (Hellwig 1992, Twine 1997). The unfinished project
of modernity in Brazil turns out to be equivalent to the unfinished task
of social liberation and struggles for egalitarianism. This included the
public justification of policymaking by the Judiciary, Legislative and
Executive powers, which were mostly serving the interests of the white
elites, a minority compared to Native Brazilian and African populations
in this country. While the theme of racial mixing was central to the
construction of the identity of the US, miscegenation was constitutive
of the Brazilian identity since colonization. As Luciana Brito remarks,
When, from the 1880s onwards, the United States reinforced segregatio-
nist policies as a form of protecting its original nation project for white
men, Latin American nations, including Brazil, adopted other national
projects for homogenizing the population, which occurred through racial
mixing as a form of making black and indigenous populations disappear
[…]. At the same time they produced an ideal about themselves, they also
produced an image about an “other” who was black, tropical, miscegena-
ted, and also degenerated. (2016, 19)
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 63

Decolonizing critical theory, therefore, means undermining the

hegemonic, ruling narratives of both institutionalized and societal
spheres, such as the media and local press. We appeal to Stuart Hall’s
(1998) conception of diasporic, cultural identity in order to describe
the hybridity of Afro-Brazilian identity as an intercultural mixture of
African, European and Native-American identities, according to first-­
person, autobiographical narratives in so-called “black press” in Brazil’s
Deep South (especially in the state of Rio Grande do Sul). It is well
known that the term diaspora has been largely used as a conceptual tool
to analyze the experience of people of African descent during the
XXth century, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. To be sure, the
Greek word diaspora, “scattering, dispersion,” was originally used to
name the Greeks who emigrated and traveled around conquered lands
in the ancient Hellenic world. The term was later used to refer to the
Jews during the Babylonian exile following the fall of Jerusalem in the
VIth century before the Christian era. The biblical imagery (e.g., “thou
shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth,” Deuteronomy 28:25)
was deliberately appropriated by many black people and provided a
­common identity and purpose for those living in the Americas, Asia, and
Europe. This imagery was even adopted by the pan-African pluralist
identities (including creoles, mulattoes, coloreds, Black Muslims, pardos)
of today’s diasporic movements and Diaspora Studies:
Indeed, when the number of Africans on the continent is added to that of
Africans in the diaspora, the size of the black world is very large. Africa’s
population is estimated at over 850 million. In Brazil alone, people of
African descent number at least 100 million, the largest black population
of any country outside of Africa; the U.S. black population is 33 million
(accounting for 13% of the U.S. population); and the Caribbean has some
40 million black people. (Asante and Mazama 2005, 218)
Hence, one may analyze and discuss the construction of identities in
the African Diaspora in Europe and the Americas (especially in the U.S.
and Brazil), as well as the new Black social movements, such as Black
liberation and Black feminism (Davis 1981, Harris 1993), in order
to articulate the phenomenological contribution to a critical theory of
society. By bringing together the empirical and theoretical constructs
of marginalized narratives, such as Afro-Brazilian diasporic accounts of
social liberation and cultural freedom, this phenomenological contribu-
tion could succeed in overcoming the traditional, colonialist views of
modernity, of moral and social progress (Allen 2016). Our decolonial
64 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

approach certainly takes for granted Mbembe’s view that a large part of
modern history, race, and class have co-constituted one another, just as
Eurocentric modernity and coloniality belong together: “the plantation
and colonial systems were the factories par excellence of race and racism”1.
Furthermore, it is our contention that the exchange and circulation of
ideas in Brazil’s black diaspora, particularly in the Afro-Brazilian news-
paper O Exemplo (The Example), helps us map and discuss the ethnic-­
racial and gender representations constructed in the narratives produced
by the editors of this publication, during the campaign for the construc-
tion of a monument to “Black Mother.” As we briefly analyze how
the newspaper’s editors have appropriated texts that circulated in other
newspapers about the campaign for the monument of “Black Mother,”
we can see how they adapted them to their own interests and gave them
new meanings. From the theoretical approach of cultural studies, the
black press can be regarded as a cultural artifact that not only informs
but also produces discourses and representations that contribute to the
formation of black subjectivities and identities in the last decade of
the XIXth century and the first decade of the XXth century (Zubaran and
Vargas, 2015). We can thus infer how black leaderships represented
themselves and their captivity, freedom and racial relations in post-­
abolition and how they negotiated the construction of their ethno-racial
identities in the historical context of struggles against racism and social
exclusion in Porto Alegre, in Brazil’s Deep South. This turns out to be
in agreement with Mbembe’s (2013, 60) thesis. The birth of the racial
subject of biopolitics and of blackness can be recast against the back-
ground of capitalism (both early and late capitalism) with its power
structure, societal influence, and nationwide polarization. Capitalism
has always depended on racial relations to exploit the planet’s resources.
In this sense, a liberationist critique of capitalism comes full circle in its
critical-theoretical narratives of social justice, recognition, and justification
insofar as these narratives originated from people’s own self-understand-
ing and accounts of themselves. According to Hall, cultural identities are
always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural
identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identifica-
tion or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and
culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics

1
 “Le système de la plantation et la colonie furent en cela des fabriques par excellence
de la race et du racisme” (Mbembe 2013, 63).
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 65

of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an

unproblematic, transcendental “law of origin”. (1998, 226)

We thus proceed to explore the concrete struggles for recognition

and lasting contributions of Brazil’s black press in a decolonizing per-
spective that avoids both essentialist conceptions of cultural identity and
the deterministic positivism of traditional Marxist analyses of slavery.
The latter tended to reduce abolition to the economic transformation of
pre-capitalist mercantilism and capitalism and this transformation was
usually detrimental to the role of slaves’ resistance insofar as liberalism
replaced slave labor with industrial and wage workers (Slenes 2019).
We can thus revisit the strategies of Afro-Brazilians’ activist opposition
to racial prejudice as manifested in the kind of education promoted by
the editors of the newspaper of the black press O Exemplo (1892-1930)
in the post-abolition era. The main objective of this combination of
historical and critical-theoretical research is to shed light on the leader-
ship of black intellectuals in the newspaper O Exemplo in the fight
against racial prejudices and in the defense of the education of the black
community. At the same time, we want to recognize and assess their
situated knowledge and the “standpoint of their discourse”2.
Besides critical theory, we are resorting to the theoretical approach of
cultural studies, particularly the discussions of Stuart Hall (2013) on the
strategies to challenge stereotypes and cultural pedagogies. In methodo-
logical terms, we start by mapping the accusations of racial prejudice
in education and the chronicles of the campaign against illiteracy. In a
second moment, we analyze the arguments that black writers have
constructed in their denunciations of racial bias in education. Among
other things, the research shows that black intellectuals of the newspaper
O Exemplo fought the racial prejudices in education by using a nation-
alist and patriotic discourse, which emphasized the participation of
blacks, as part of the Brazilian people, in the construction of the nation.
There is also the presence of Christian arguments that denounced the
prejudices as “immoral” and as the main reason for black children’s
school dropouts.
The newspaper O Exemplo appeared in Porto Alegre in 1892 and,
with some interruptions, circulated until 1930. This periodical, founded

2
 In Portuguese, lugar de fala, as Djamila Ribeiro (2017) uses the expression in
reference to Black feminist movements, which defy the powers that be.
66 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

and produced by blacks, was the first printed record in the history of
the black community in Rio Grande do Sul and it has invaluable histor-
ical and cultural value for accessing the memories and stories of blacks
in the post-abolition period. In the wake of the seminal study by John
Downing (2004), the newspaper O Exemplo is considered part of the
so-called radical media. It includes the tradition of self-management,
thus being neither in the hands of parties nor of unions, nor of an
owner. Rather, it presented itself as the property of an association, which
included former members of the Brotherhood of the Rosary, as well as
workers, civil servants, military personnel, and liberal professionals.
Furthermore, it was a small-scale newspaper and an ethnic minority
media, which, according to Downing (2004, 127), “occupies a central
position in the radical and resistance media.” Insofar as it was an ethnic
minority media, it presented an assertive content, as can be seen in the
denunciations of racial prejudices in education and in the campaigns
against illiteracy, as we will see below.

Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, and the Phenomenology of Otherness

Prior to his work at the Open University, where he retired as Professor
Emeritus in 1997, Stuart Hall was one of the most prominent figures at
the Center for Cultural Studies, of which he was also an active director
between the years 1968 and 1979, at the University of Birmingham, in
the United Kingdom. As it was the case for the Frankfurter thinkers,
most of Hall’s texts arose from a strong connection with social, cultural
or artistic movements that dealt with themes considered relevant to
social change and the transformation of political culture (Zubaran,
Wortmann, and Kirchof 2016). This is how some of the normative
problems raised by critical theory at the turn of the century refer to
the persisting challenges of historicism, injustice, and neoliberalism in
Western democracies. Habermas (1981), Honneth (1995), and Fraser
(1997), for example, used their respective theories of communicative
reason, recognition, and participatory parity to articulate an immanent
critique of capitalism with a normative reconstruction of political agency
and thereby recasting a situated self vis-à-vis its concrete Other (Benhabib,
1992). In so doing, they paved the way for the so-called fourth generation
of the Frankfurt School with its new approaches to modern sociality,
such as its justificatory claims (Forst 2011), the critique of forms of life
(Lebensformen) (Jaeggi 2014), the decolonial critique of the Eurocentric
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 67

idea of progress (Allen 2016), the genealogy of political imagination

(Saar, 2007), social acceleration and resonance (Rosa 2005, 2016), and
the new critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) (Celikates 2018).
In their innovative tackling of the unsolved problems of alienation
and reification, these neo-Marxist analyses have succeeded in rehabili-
tating reflexivity, social affects, the imaginary, and imagination beyond
the colonialist, teleological models of progress, polity, and historicity.
Thus, they have shown in what sense these models can still be inte-
grated in the original, radical contributions of the first generation of
the Frankfurt School. They resorted to the social phenomenology of
reflexivity and first-person propositional attitudes, taken up from an
immanent and reconstructive critical stance.3 By so doing, they avoided
reconstructionism (understood as empirical reductionism, such as his-
toricist and cultural reconstructions) and experimentalism (mental,
cultural, existential experiments), as much as historicism, on the one
hand, and methodological normativism (such as the foundationalism
which is inherent in most attempts to offer a new philosophical anthro-
pology and philosophy of history), on the other.
In fact, a normative reconstruction has been shown to be a useful tool
to recast the Marxian-inspired liberationist analysis in a postcolonial,
immanent critique of today’s global capitalism and institutional organi-
zations (including the traditional family and gender structures, as well as
their intersectionality with ethnicity and racial critical theory). A libera-
tionist genealogical critique of the authoritarian, peripheral capitalism
entails a “historical ontology of ourselves,” as subjects of truth, power,
and ethics in self-constituting modes of being, which characterize the
fate of modernity in Latin America: both dependency theory (Fernando
Henrique Cardo, Theotonio dos Santos, and Celso Furtado) and libera-
tion theology (Rubem Alves, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Leonardo Boff)
emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s as critical responses to U.S.-led
programs aimed at fostering social and economic development (in Spanish,
desarrollo) as well as the imperialist interventions in Latin America after
the Cuban Revolution in 1959 (Gutiérrez 1973). It is well known that
Latin American liberation theology in those decades was greatly indebted
to the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School, especially to

3
 This is analogous to what is taking place in the discussion that is currently going
on in analytic social epistemology in response to the normative challenges of both skep-
ticism and relativism (Carter 2016).
68 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

the social utopian, negative dialectical thrusts of Benjamin’s, Adorno’s,

Horkheimer’s, Bloch’s, and Marcuse’s critique of authoritarian capitalism,
which were then perceived as a third-way alternative to the Cold War
(De Oliveira 2016). Habermas’s normative claims and the pragmatist,
linguistic turn of his discourse ethics and theory of communicative
action were also embraced by several liberation thinkers who were fight-
ing the neoliberal agenda that coincided with the end of military regimes
in the 1980s and the transition to democracy in the 1990s.
It is against such a dynamic context of critical, global challenges that
we approach Afro-Brazilian diasporic movements today, in the so-called
“transnational perspectives” in cultural studies (Bauböck and Faist 2010).
These movements manifest the cultural dynamics of global migrations
and their enriching contributions to the Brazilian melting pot insofar
as liberating practices emerge out of oppressive, racist regimes and make
normative claims of self-identity and emancipation. In the same vein,
intersectionality refers also to the Judeo-Christian fundamental leit­
motivs of love, compassion, social justice, and solidarity, which make
up a certain conception of liberation, both as a theoretical discourse
(political, pedagogical, theological, philosophical, ethical) and as an
activism (a social praxis and ethos).
A philosophical ethos of liberation is a view that takes into account
that Brazil never experienced a revolution, an intellectual, cultural move-
ment like the Enlightenment nor any political, republican liberalism –
either conservative or otherwise. Only in the last thirty years have we
experienced something of an ever-growing democracy. Today’s norma-
tive claims for liberation remain much closer to the seventies and eight-
ies’ calls for resistance to and critique of the status quo (against a military
regime that stayed in power for twenty-one years). This shows that
Brazilian democracy was no gift from the military or the presumptuous
elites who supported it. Brazilian workers and all representatives of the
underclass, the outcast, the urban homeless and the rural landless, stood
up then for the poor, together with liberationists, just as they still do
today for women’s rights, gay rights, black emancipation, the empower-
ment and autonomy of indigenous groups. More recently, they also take
a stand for animals (Susin and Zampieri 2015). Interestingly several
Latin American liberationist texts date back to the time when Peter Singer’s
Animal Liberation (1975) first came out, which coincided also with
major contributions to women’s liberation and black liberation move-
ments. In fact, Herbert Marcuse’s epoch-making essay on liberation
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 69

(1969), at the zenith of student movements all over Europe, Brazil, and
the U.S., was then invoked as an important prophetic milestone, at a time
when civil liberties were becoming more and more inclusive. In Marcuse’s
words,
Admittedly freedom is also a liberation – man making himself free from
all “empirical” determinants of the will, the liberation of the person from
the domination of sensuality which enters into the constitution of the
human animal as a “created being” – but this liberation leaves all types of
actual servitude untouched. (2005, 141)

Marcuse followed his Frankfurt colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer

in their critique of instrumentality, which is the most pervasive and
powerful form of domination of modern capitalism. He also believed
in social liberation as a utopian restoration of the harmony of human
existence and nature. Habermas offered a thorough critique of Marcuse
in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (Technik und Wissenschaft
als “Ideologie” (1970)), in which he presents his first critique of Max
Weber’s conception of goal-oriented action (zweckrationales Handeln),
following the early Frankfurt critique of instrumental reason. He also
signals his linguistic, pragmatic turn, which was very much inspired
and guided by his interactions with Karl-Otto Apel, especially the lat-
ter’s transcendental, semantic explorations of Peirce, Wittgenstein,
Husserl, and Heidegger (Apel 1973). In fact, in the early 1970s,
Habermas abandoned the Marxian-inspired paradigm of production
and the original Frankfurt School’s Ideologiekritik of late capitalism.
He developed a theory of communicative action (kommunikatives
Handeln) based on a sophisticated, revisited conception of the lifeworld
(Lebenswelt), which he saw as an alternative to Niklas Luhmann’s sys-
tems theory and Weberian-inspired theories of action and instrumental
action (instrumentelles Handeln). It is in the very articulation between
a discourse ethics (Diskursethik) and its reformulations of autonomy,
political culture, and the forms of social life (Lebensformen) in everyday
practices that meaning (Bedeutung) is to be sought. He conceived
action and speech as belonging together in their socially and linguisti-
cally constituted aspects of grammatical, syntactic, and pragmatic nor-
mativity (Apel 1998). According to Habermas, one cannot account for
the sociality of the lifeworld without presupposing that this lifeworld
has been constituted intersubjectively, thus by the otherness of social
subjects of speech and acts.
70 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

From Lifeworld to Lifeforms: The Phenomenological Deficit of Critical

Theory

What mattered the most to Habermas (1984, 1989) was to oppose

the new linguistic paradigm of the Lebenswelt to the solipsist, dualist
conceptions of contractualism (e.g., the state of nature versus the rule
of law) as well as to the deterministic monism of sociological systemic
theories (autopoiesis). He wanted at the same time to address the tech-
nological reifications of late capitalism and the normative challenges
which arise when we reformulate Kant’s unsociable sociability in an inter-
pretive theory of action and in a public political culture in liberal democ-
racies (in Rawlsian terms). Indeed, through the hundreds of works and
authors cited in the two volumes of his Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns, the names of Marx, Durkheim, Mead, Parsons, and Weber
did occupy a prominent place. However, now modernity and rationali-
zation must be met by the deep-meaning structures of democratic, liberal
societies (i.e., their functional interpretation), which take public deliber-
ation and social justice seriously.
An archeology of the Habermasian conception of Lebenswelt would
refer us to dozens of other writings, some of them still from the 1960s,
when he began to develop a normative reconstruction of social meanings
in a linguistic-pragmatic direction. Habermas clearly acknowledged his
indebtedness to both Husserl and Heidegger in what could be regarded
as the most robust sociological appropriation of phenomenology since
Alfred Schütz (Welton 2000, 96 ff.). After all, sense, meaning, and
signification occupy an outstanding place within Husserl’s monumental
corpus, throughout over 45,000 pages of shorthand writings, notes, and
unfinished manuscripts. We know that Heidegger had access to several
of these unpublished writings, notably to the second book of Ideas, which
also greatly influenced Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.
Husserlian phenomenology does provide the material for a theory of
meaning and for a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld,
which would ultimately pave the way for Habermas’s linguistic turn in
his social and political philosophy. However, key concepts, such as
consciousness, intentionality, representation, reduction, signification,
constitution, intersubjectivity, and the noetic-noematic correlation
remained within a transcendental investigation.
According to Habermas (1984, 70f., 108), this transcendental inves-
tigation failed to overcome the dichotomies between subject and object,
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 71

on the one hand, and between theory and praxis, on the other. Social
thinkers who are sympathetic to both Habermas’s and Brazilian critical
theory, like Frédéric Vandenberghe (2002), can still appeal to Husserl’s
concept of empathy (Einfühlung) in the latter’s transcendental phenom-
enology of intersubjectivity as an interesting alternative to Habermas’s
theory of communicative action. Yet, the question remains whether
empathy or intersubjectivity alone can account for the way concrete
individuals are socialized in a given social ethos insofar as they become
individuals through socialization, whereby institutions offer stable, val-
ued, and recurring patterns of social behavior. Institutions are, for their
part, identified with a social purpose and thus transcend individuals
and individual intentions to the extent that they mediate the rules that
govern societal behavior. Thus, for Habermas, institutional facts are
correlated to features of the lifeworld, as third-person objectifications
are to first-person living experiences of empathy and intersubjectivity.
They form together with the latter an important subset of social facts,
broadly understood, for having the status functions we intend them to
have (Habermas 1989). In Brazil, this can be clearly observed in the
so-called Brazilian way (jeitinho) of transgressing, bending or using legal
procedures in one’s own benefit without any accountability or regard
for the social, public good (Power and Taylor 2011). Yet, this is also
the only means to defy, transgress, and resist oppressive domination, as
they could be found among slaves vis-à-vis their slave-owners (Schwarcz
and Starling 2018, 102ff). Furthermore, Husserl’s guiding idea of
avoiding dogmatic positions, such as between a Platonic ontological
realism (e.g., Frege’s logicism) and a Kantian anti-realism (the episte-
mological idealism inherent in psychologism), could not overcome the
traditional paradigm of language, in that intuition fulfilled the corre-
sponding presence of represented things (an empty meaning intention)
for a rational, thinking speaker. However, Husserl’s phenomenological
concepts of world and lifeworld were indeed decisive for what he later
outlined as a generative phenomenology of meaning (De Almeida
1972). As Husserl writes,
The lifeworld [Lebenswelt], for us who wakingly live in it, is always already
there [immer schon da], existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all
praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us,
the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasio-
nally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and
possible praxis, as horizon. (Husserl 1970, 142)
72 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

For Husserl, the ontology of the Lebenswelt is intersubjectively and

linguistically constituted in the subject, more precisely in the “living
presence” of the subject, who is not just consciousness, but a unity of
a lived body and a mind (both Körper-Leib and Geist). Dilthey’s and
Heidegger’s influence upon Husserl cannot be denied in the 1930s
(especially Dilthey’s articulation of Erlebnis, lived experience, and the
historical (Geschichtlich), as well as Heidegger’s ontical-ontological dif-
ference with its interplay between ontological worldhood and the dif-
ferent ontical significations of world). We also know that the term
Lebenswelt had already been used by Husserl as early as 1917 (Biemel
1959, 204 f.), and was used in several passages in the second book of
Ideas, from 1916-17, in an appendix to section 64, on the primacy of
the (absolute) spirit over (relative) nature (Husserl 1989, 384, see
302n), and in several writings in the 1920s). Lebenswelt was then used
to characterize the communicative personal world, the natural world,
the intuitive world, and the aesthetic world of historical, lived experi-
ence, as opposed to the naturalist and objective conceptions of the
natural sciences. Lebenswelt, in this sense, is taken as equivalent to
Umwelt (environmental world), Alltagswelt (everyday world), Erfahrung-
swelt (world of experience) and the natural concept of world (natürli-
cher Weltbegriff), which Husserl borrows from Richard Avenarius. But
it is most notably in the Krisis texts (Husserl 1970) of the 1930s that
Husserl provides us with at least four provisional concepts of lifeworld,
namely: lifeworld is what can be meaningfully given in intuition, the
ground of sense, the realm of relative subjective truths, and what
appears as an essential structure, as a perceptual world (Eidos). Accord-
ingly, for the later Husserl the lifeworld comes down to the overall,
pre-theoretical horizon of meaning, not only of everyday, social prac-
tices but also of scientific research, including meaningful induction and
so-called contexts of discovery and technical constructions (Steinbock
1996, 88-96). As Anthony Steinbock’s brilliant study has shown, the
four preliminary conceptions of lifeworld in the Krisis would thus be
irreducible to a single concept and could not allow for a coherent,
unambiguous theory of the lifeworld in Husserl. Such a theory could
be otherwise summarized according to its program of transcendental
phenomenological research, as Steinbock remarks,
1. The world is presupposed as having the same structure of an object.
2. From a phenomenological standpoint, that means that the world becomes
a correlate to intentional life (as in a Cartesian analysis of the world).
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 73

3. The world becomes an all-embracing unity, a telos and arche, a single consti-
tutive force.
4. Precisely as “futural” world, it marks the development of the unitary sense
of all objects, communities, and cultures.
5. In the last analysis, there is no longer the possibility of finding a radically
other world, that is, a Heimwelt implies every possible Fremdwelt, insofar as
they are co-constituted in opposed modalities (normal and anormal) of sense
constitution. (Steinbock 1996, 102)

Such is precisely the sense of a phenomenological gap in critical the-

ory as third-person, objective accounts of sociality tend to eclipse the
familiarity which is always taken for granted in the social world (“our”
shared, intersubjective world), both as lifeworld and as forms of social
life. In a subsequent volume to his seminal reflections on postmeta­
physical thinking (Nachmetaphysisches Denken, 1988), titled Postmeta-
physical Thinking II (2017), Habermas consolidates a detranscendental-
ized primacy of practice over theory in a radical opposition to traditional
approaches to philosophy and metaphysics. At the same time, he closes
this gap between theory and practice as it deals with the paradigm shift
from metaphysical worldviews (Weltbilden, Weltanschauungen) to the
lifeworld and with the implicit meanings that accompany everyday
thought and action as background knowledge, as they had been out-
lined in his magnum opus (Habermas 1984, 1989). If he could boldly
say, in the first volume, that “the lifeworld must be defended against
extreme alienation at the hands of the objectivating, moralizing, and
aestheticizing interventions of expert cultures” (Habermas 1992, 18), he
now analyzes the Lebenswelt as a “public space of reasons” (öffentlicher
Raum der Gründe). It is the place where, through validity claims, the
performative sense of what is subjectively lived, what is intersubjectively
binding, and what is believed to be objective (der performative Sinn des
subjektiv Gelebten, des intersubjektiv Verbindlichen und des als objektiv
Vermeinten) come together through linguistic communication. In his
own words,
Therefore, the phenomenologically described lifeworld [die phänomeno-
logisch beschriebene Lebenswelt] can also be understood as a background
of communicative action [Hintergrund kommunikativen Handelns] and
refer to processes of understanding [Verständigungsprozesse]. The focus of
the lifeworld horizon is then no longer the life of consciousness of a
transcendental ego as with Husserl, but the communicative relationship
(die kommunikative Beziehung) between at least two participants, alter
and ego. For both communication participants, the lifeworld opens up as
74 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

the accompanying, only implicitly present, arbitrarily expandable horizon,

in which the current encounter is localized in the dimensions of the
experienced social space and the lived historical time that are also only
performatively present. (Habermas 2017, 22)
What we have called the phenomenological deficit of critical theory
allows indeed for such a recasting of an African-Brazilian phenomenol-
ogy of liberation, precisely at the level of a weak social constructionism.
This constructionism mitigates and mediates some of the overly strong,
objectivist claims of Marxism in liberation philosophy and some of the
overly weak, subjectivist “representations” of most versions of postcolo-
nial and cultural studies). Habermas identified the former as reminiscent
of an objectivating positivism and naturalism, and correctly perceives the
latter as a postmodernist slippery slope toward nihilism and relativism.
In this sense, the future of liberation philosophy in Latin America hinges
upon the very fate of social democracy, itself bound to the ups and
downs of globalized capitalism in developing societies. As the same time,
this future invites its own construction from below, through historically
situated narratives of self-emancipation and self-assertion. Insofar as
there is no ontological commitment to an essentialist universalism in
pan-African, diasporic identities, we defend a pragmatist perspectivism
in semantic, phenomenological terms (Rehg and Bohman 2001), as an
Afro-Brazilian self-understanding (Selbstverstehen) of race and multi­
culturalism. This self-understanding aims at both deconstructing racial
democracy myths (which is in itself a deconstruction of scientific, his-
torical conceptions of race) and liberating accounts (such as Eurocentric
grand narratives of freedom, including colonialism, capitalism, liberal-
ism, and socialism), without being reduced to any anarchist, libertarian,
communitarian or nihilistic view.
There was a salient shift in Habermas’s own approach to the Lebens­
welt, in part as a response to Honneth’s and others’ critiques of his
systemic approach to the paradoxical colonization of the lifeworld insofar
as it both denounced modernity’s reifying, alienating rationalization
and celebrated the normative potential of its unfinished project in late
capitalist societies. The phenomenological deficit of critical theory was
also addressed by Rahel Jaeggi’s critique of life-forms (Lebensformen),
understood as a web of intertwined features belonging to social practices,
institutions, and the social interactions in the lifeworld. These life-forms
make human relations social. Jaeggi’s critique does not abandon the view
that social critique arises from the immanent soil of the lifeworld nor
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 75

does it succumb to the Habermasian systematic oppositions of “ethics”

vs. “morality” – or “the good life” vs. “moral principles” or “the right”
vs. “the good” (Jaeggi 2015, 13). Jaeggi argues for a phenomenological
conception of sociality, which co-constitutes the self and the lifeworld.
This allows for an integrated view of the lifeworld as a bundle of prac-
tices (Bündel von Praktiken). These practices in their reciprocal connec-
tions indicate that forms of life are collective formations, tokens of the
coexistence of human orders or a way of life that does not refer to just
one person but decisively contributes to closing the gap between first-
and third-person reversible exchanges of sociality at the very phenome-
nality of the Lebenswelt (Jaeggi and Celikates 2017). These exchanges
are based on shared social practices which include a normative aspect,
constitutive of a person both as an individual and as a social being, as a
being always already embedded and inserted into social, institutional
contexts of meanings and interactions. An individual’s way of life thus
indicates that she is also pre-theoretically immersed and participates in
a collective, institutional praxis. This praxis shapes her individual acts,
including her hybrid, porous self-identity and normative claims. This
does not amount to reducing any good shared form of life to a “privat-
ized” form (just like Wittgenstein’s argument against private language).
This in fact undermines the liberal ideal of the constitutional state as
an ethically neutral coexistence of different forms of life.
Hence, a critical-theorical critique of forms of life “is not intended as
advocating for a relapse into premodern paternalism, but instead as an
exploration of the conditions of what can be conceived in the tradition
of critical theory as a ferment of individual and collective emancipation
processes” (Jaeggi 2014, 9). Jaeggi’s conception of “identity in differ-
ence” (Jaeggi 2014, 337) is precisely what allows for an Afro-Brazilian
critique of patrimonialism, taken in a broader sense beyond its Weberian
original usage, as Schwarcz has pointed out, and refers to a form of
power in which the boundaries between public and private spheres
become so blurred that they end up being confused: patrimonialism
began to designate, in Brazilian authoritarian imaginary, “the use of per-
sonal interests, devoid of ethics or morals, through public mechanisms”
(Schwarcz 2019, 66). After the abolition of slavery and the birth of an
emancipated republic, the intention was to form an independent elite,
disconnected from the cultural ties that bound us to the European
metropolis (Portugal) and to replace the foreign hegemony through
the creation of law schools, which would supposedly be responsible for
76 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

developing Brazilian thinking and giving the nation a new constitution

At the end of the XIXth century, this plan ended up fostering a racialized
society and a paternalist state, taking social Darwinism and racial evolu-
tionist schools as their grand models of analysis (Schwarcz 1999, 141 f.).
Indeed, patrimonialism in Brazil had become the public form of life of
a patriarchal, authoritarian ethos in which tremendous social, economic
inequalities unveiled an intersectional conjugation of structural racism
with a male-dominated society:
A profusion of official statistics demonstrates how Afro-Brazilian popula-
tions are the object of the “intersection” of a series of social markers of
difference that end up negatively conditioning their inclusion in society,
with more precarious access to health, employment, education, transport
and housing […]. The number of femicides remains high in the country
– 4.8 per 100,000 women, according to data for 2013 but published in
2015 –, our rate being the fifth highest in the world, according to infor-
mation from the World Health Organization (WHO). Regarding race,
the number of murders of black women, from 2003 to 2013, grew 54%,
going from 1,864 to 2,875 cases. (Schwarcz 2019, 204)

The only way to subvert these social pathologies is by reaffirming the

ongoing struggles for recognition and social justice that have been taking
place since the abolition of slavery in this country in 1888. Authoritar-
ianism was not the peculiar feature of one or of a few strong personalities
who took power in Brazil, but rather refers to a violent structure of
oppression, inserted within the modern colonial system of human
exploitation, of which global capitalism is just the refined form today.
Moral universalism reflects some of the major contributions of Judeo-­
Christian, diasporic movements towards a more inclusive and participa-
tory egalitarianism, in spite of all their shortcomings and contradictions.
In this regard, Habermas could also refer to Honneth’s Pathologien des
Sozialen and has rightly observed that social pathologies arise only as a
consequence of the fact that economic relations and bureaucratic regu-
lations invade the communicative core areas of the private and public
spheres of the lifeworld:
These pathologies are not limited to personality structures; they extend
just as much to the transmission of meaning and the dynamic of social
integration. This interaction between system and lifeworld is reflected in
the imbalanced division of labor between the three forces that hold society
together: solidarity, on the one side; money and administrative power on
the other. (Habermas 2001, 176)
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 77

Black Press and Afro-Brazilian Diasporic Identities

We have proposed to combine Stuart Hall’s contributions with critical
theory in our historiographical, phenomenological reconstruction of
black press and diaspora in Brazil. In order to achieve these goals, we
now need to bring out the centrality of culture in Hall’s work. The
historical context has always played an important role in Hall’s theori-
zation, together with an overview of how ethnic and racial issues began
to acquire relevance in the Brazilian context. Hall’s main contributions
to the ongoing discussions on ethnic-racial relations and black identities
in Brazil consist in recasting key concepts, such as race, racism, identity,
diaspora, and racialized representations. It is usually assumed that the
French sociologist Roger Bastide (1946) – who replaced Claude Lévi-
Strauss in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of São
Paulo, Brazil, in 1938 – pioneered the use of the term “black press”
(presse noire) to designate newspapers founded and produced by blacks
to express their interests. Bastide was also one of the first Europeans
to undertake a sociology of Afro-Brazilian religions and poetry. He ana-
lyzed their struggles for recognition and autochthonous appropriation
of the cultural goods and authentic practices, which he called “the battle
of the races for egalitarianism” (la bataille des races pour l’égalisation)
(Bastide 1996, 196).
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (1999, 2019) has convincingly argued that
Brazil’s persisting social and economic inequalities ultimately refer us
back to slavery and to the oligarchical, authoritarian system that always
kept the elites in power, especially by sticking to unjust, structural sys-
tems, such as the legal and administrative institutions of what has been
known as Brazilian patrimonialism. In the same vein, in an important
study on racial prejudice in Brazil, Oracy Nogueira (1998) argues that,
although there is no unconditional exclusion of blacks from the most
favored social classes in Brazil, their social ascension is hampered by
issues related to their skin color. According to this author, in the absence
of a more adequate expression, the term “prejudice”4 as it appears in
Brazil, can be designated as a somewhat “brand prejudice.” This is dif-
ferent from a true prejudice as it appears in the United States, because
of its institutional connotation of racial apartheid. According to

4
 In Portuguese, the word preconceito, like the French préjugé, includes the idea of
a preconception, pre-judgement.
78 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

Nogueira (1998), the expression “brand prejudice” is nothing but a

reformulation of the expression “color prejudice,” which the author uses
in other writings in relation to the “racial situation” in Brazilian society.
However, as the historian Maria Helena Capelato (1988) points out, it
is worth remembering that, although the press is a powerful resource for
historical analysis, “the journalistic fact is construed” and thus “not an
impartial and neutral transmitter of events.” Therefore, based on this
assumption, the historian seeks to study social actors as agents of history
and to capture the living movement of ideas and characters that circulate
on the pages of newspapers (Capelato 1988, 21).
It is also worth mentioning the arguments of Magali Engel and Flávia
de Souza (2015), who emphasize that, in modern times, the press con-
stitutes an “open gallery for talents” and functions like a “great intellec-
tual bank.” For these authors, newspapers are configured in a symbolic
and social space “which could allow for young literary debutants to
enter the literary scene and would also be a means to sustain their live-
lihood,” besides facilitating their social ascension (Engel and Souza
2015, 13 f.). On the other hand, from the theoretical perspective of
cultural studies, the black press produces and disseminates teachings or
cultural pedagogies, values, and models of behavior that contribute to
the formation of black subjectivities and identities. In the same vein,
Tomaz Tadeu da Silva writes that, like education, other cultural
instances are also pedagogical, as they also have a pedagogy and teach
things that influence both educational systems and culture in general,
as they are involved in the formation of subjects (Da Silva 1999, 139).
In this sense, José Antônio dos Santos (2003) in his study of the black
newspaper A Alvorada (The Dawn) in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, high-
lights the fact that one of the objectives of the post-abolition black press
was to disseminate, in a pedagogical way, models and rules of behavior
for the black community, seeking to prepare them for their social inclu-
sion in the nation. The most relevant research in Brazilian historio­
graphy on post-abolition has shown the leading role played by the black
press and its importance for the study of Afro-Brazilian communities in
the post-abolition period (Andrews 1991). Also noteworthy are the
recent studies of the newspaper O Exemplo, such as those carried out by
Perussatto (2018) and Kulzer and Cunha (2018), focusing on Afro-­
Brazilian social history, black press, and historiography, including
reports of the Spanish influenza pandemic in Porto Alegre in the peri-
odical at the beginning of the XXth century.
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 79

These seminal studies have contributed to shed light on the role of

Afro-Brazilians in the public sphere, particularly in their fight against
racial prejudices and structural racism and in their defense of higher
education and social inclusion of the black community. They made their
cultural and artistic productions visible, as well as their normative claims
heard in the public sphere. The relevance and timeliness of these studies
on Afro-Brazilians is linked to the quite recent Affirmative Action policy­
making debate in Brazil, which aims at fighting racism and denouncing
racial discrimination. It is also linked to the ongoing endeavors of sectors
of civil society to implement federal legislation (Laws No. 10639 / 2003
and 11645 / 2008), which made the inclusion of African History and
Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Culture mandatory in the curricula of
public and private elementary, middle, and high schools nationwide.
It is also worth mentioning that only recently, thanks to initiatives like
this, new instances of racial prejudice in education have been publicly
repudiated in the media, demonstrating the importance of strategies to
combat racial prejudice in contemporary times.
Racial prejudices and discrimination were intensified in the Brazilian
post-abolition context, making the integration and social mobility of
the black population enormously difficult. Richard Graham (1999)
observed that the Brazilian state maintained a hierarchy based on color,
which prevented free blacks from being integrated under the same
­conditions as white citizens in Brazilian post-abolition society. This
applied to Brazil’s greatest writer of all times, Machado de Assis, who,
being himself a mulatto, only achieved upward mobility and succeeded
as homme de lettres because of his indifference towards the prevailing
whitening ideology – to the point of self-deception and even consider-
ing himself to be white (Daniel 2016). In practice, Brazilian hierarchies
based on skin color obviously meant that those with a darker color did
not have the same status or rights as those with a lighter skin. Paulina
Alberto also pointed out that “although there was no explicit reference
to race in the constitutional definition of citizenship, the founders of
the First Republic managed, in an indirect way, to systematize a series
of class and race exclusions in Brazil’s legal and political institutions”
(2011, 43). Afro-Brazilian journalists construed their denunciation of
color prejudice at the Catholic Institute and argued that it was an act
against “the doctrines of fraternity spread by the Christian religion.”
They criticized the “false faith” and the “monastic impudence” of the
Catholic Sisters:
80 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

As though the mixed folks from Brazil were not in the very land that saw
their birth! As though they were not so much children of God as the best
foreigner who has trod this blessed soil! As though the adventurers who
landed here, even under monastic dress, had dared to take over the child-
ren of the country! As though they should be lackeys! As though Christ
deprived any race to share the belief in God! Stupid boldness! Cynical
boldness! (O Exemplo, February 20 (1916): 1)

Another case of denouncing prejudices in education is an article about

the principal of a local school of Porto Alegre, Alfredo Clemente Pinto,
author of the work Seleta em Prosa e Verso. It was reported that “he had
ordered schoolgirls of a dark or brown color not to appear in the tributes
that the school would perform at the São Pedro Theater in honor of the
Independence of the Fatherland on the 7th of September [Brazil’s most
important national holiday]” (O Exemplo, 10 September 1916). The case
was widely debated in the newspaper and had repercussions in other
local and national newspapers.
Durval Albuquerque (2007) points out two moments in which nation-
alist discourses were triggered in the post-abolition period: a first moment,
at the end of slavery and the Proclamation of the Republic (1889) was
linked to the need to form a national identity, which would unite all
Brazilians; a second moment, in the post-first war, was due to the Euro-
pean crises that encouraged a rethinking of the issue of ‘Brazilianness’
(brasilidade) and of “our place in the world” as a nation. Brazilian elites
used the nationalist discourse as a way of defending national sovereignty,
given Brazil’s fragility in relation to other countries involved in the con-
flict. According to Alberto (2011), Afro-Brazilian writers and the black
press triggered a discourse for national fraternity, associating it to the
demands of an inclusive and egalitarian citizenship. Alberto (2011) points
out that the very idea of “​ racial fraternity” marked the 1910s and 1920s
in Brazil and that a discourse of harmony between blacks and whites was
produced as a strategy to combat prejudice and foster social integration.
Accordingly, combative black intellectuals of the beginning of the century
argued in favor of racial harmony and inclusion as a form of contestation
against a narrative dominated by pseudoscientific, biological racism.
Alberto stresses that making use of the “racial fraternity” discourse was
an alternative way that black intellectuals used to face the pseudoscientific
racism that treated them as outcasts in the society of the time. In this
sense, the newspaper O Exemplo conveyed the ideas of defending nation-
ality and the homeland, pushing for spaces of social inclusion and
denouncing the persistent social pathologies of racial discrimination.
 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFICIT OF CRITICAL THEORY 81

Conclusion

The denunciations by the newspaper O Exemplo demonstrate that

the stigma of color persisted in the post-abolition period, a time when
Brazilian elites intended to transform the country into a modern and
white nation. According to Schwarcz (2012), it is still customary to
argue, in the Brazilian social imaginary, that there is no racial prejudice
in this country. This is based on the existence of an alleged Brazilian
“racial democracy,” a notion and a self-deceptive national ideology that
deeply mark the discussions on racial issues in Brazil up to now and
contribute to delegitimizing denunciations of inequalities suffered by the
black population in the country. In the same perspective, Kabengele
Munanga (1999) rightly argues that Brazilian society is not a racial
democracy, precisely because we live with various types of prejudice and
discrimination while we keep denying the existence of racism. According
to Munanga, Brazilian racism is complex because it is hidden, unsystem-
atic, and informal. This makes it difficult to identify and combat it. In
this context, the black intellectuals of the newspaper O Exemplo strate-
gically invested in articles and reports that fought racial prejudice and
launched campaigns to re-educate blacks in the post-abolition period.
In fact, besides the denunciations against racial prejudice, the news­
paper’s editors produced and circulated a wide campaign against illiteracy
in order to defend the mandatory nature of basic education. The writers
of O Exemplo appropriated the nationalist and patriotic discourse to com-
bat the “monster of illiteracy,” “the terrible cancer that is eating up all
the salutary energies of the process and future well-being of the country,”
which they represented as a disease that compromised the future of the
nation. Furthermore, these black leaders take ownership of a regionalist
discourse that celebrated the “honorable government of the state” and
its actions “in favor of quality education.” In their campaign against
illiteracy, associating patriotic commitment with Christian discourse,
the editors of the newspaper O Exemplo highlighted the importance
and fundamental role of the family, calling on parents to force their
children to attend school, to receive instruction, and become “dignified,
hardworking, respecting, loving citizens, and honoring family, society
and the fatherland, the three sacrosanct institutions.”
We conclude by noting that the Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage, such
as attested by the collections of articles in the newspaper O Exemplo, is
much more than simple records of a past frozen in time. These articles
bear witness to the memories and identities of ethnic minorities, which
82 NYTHAMAR DE OLIVEIRA – MARIA ANGELICA ZUBARAN

until recently were wholly excluded from official representations of

the Brazilian nation and people. In this sense, there is an urgent need
for public policies to preserve these collections of newspaper articles,
which until recently were not included in the heritage preservation in
Brazil. A recently approved legislation (MINC / UFPE / 2013 edict)
comes to fill this gap and enable projects, such as “The Right to Black
Memories” to digitize the collections of the newspaper O Exemplo and
make them publicly available online. In this way, this collection can be
known and used as a source for new research and interpretations of
fundamental aspects of the history and culture of Afro-Brazilians in
southern Brazil. The wish of the poet Oliveira Silveira is thus fulfilled,
who went to great lengths to preserve O Exemplo as an Afro-Brazilian
cultural heritage.

Nythamar de Oliveira Maria Angelica Zubaran

Philosophy Department History Department
Catholic University at Porto Alegre, Lutheran University of Brazil
Brazil (PUCRS) (Ulbra)
Av. Ipiranga, 6681 Porto Alegre, Av. Farroupilha, 8001 Canoas,
RS 90619-900 Brazil RS 92425-020 Brazil
nythamar@yahoo.com angelicazubaran@yahoo.com.br

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