SAMO©... Pedro Kilkerry, Jean-Michel Basquiat, das pilhagens ou o modus da crítica

Abstract

In the dissertation, I scrutinize the repetitions in the ways literary and cultural critiques approach Black life and artistic production. Based on the “cases” of Pedro Kilkerry, a symbolist poet from Santo Antonio - Bahia, born at the end of the 19th century, “ignored” by Brazilian literary critics, and on the African American visual artist case, who had a “troubled life” in the last decades of the 20th century, Jean-Michel Basquiat, I reflect on how certain critical procedures are related to a critical posture rooted in deterministic or, that is to say, racist criteria, of Brazilian literary criticism, in the case of Kilkerry, and of cultural and art criticism, in the “Basquiat case”. Borrowing the expression, Samo, i.e., same old shit, used by Basquiat to sign his paintings on New York walls in the 80s, I analyze these “repetitions”, this continuum, the “same old approach” within the procedures of the critique when dealing with these artists. The “repetition” observed by Basquiat and synthesized in the acronym turns into a “reading operator” in the dissertation, allowing the observation of how cultural and literary criticisms, in the cases previously mentioned, has gone no further than considering issues such as: miserable living conditions, alcoholism or consumption of drugs and narcotics, madness or geniality, non-formal literacy or “artistic literacy” processes, contrasts such as nature/culture and emotion/thought, psychic disturbances and, mainly, how these artists, as a rule, despite these issues, constitute “highlights” in the artistic and cultural scenes of their communities. This emphasis, in general, has taken the blackness of these subjects as a commodity that, beyond their works, is also being commercialized, as a way of reinforcing the idea of “genius”, isolating Black artists as exceptions. I investigate the ways in which this narrowed critique has historically built archives on Black artists in order to privilege socioanthropological notions about them to the detriment of more cautious approaches of their works. In general, this critique has considered these artists as “unusual”, “dislocated”, “accidents”, “miracles”, “inappropriate” and “out of place”. From this point of view, the objective that underlies this research is to “disrupt” these archives on Kilkerry and Basquiat, in order to be able to observe the questions that obliterated their “consecrations”, that is to say, looted their experiences. Generally speaking, critique approaches of these artists has taken place mainly under two lines of analysis, which I define in the dissertation as: the attempt to relate them to white artists, as a way of “giving coherence” and meaning to their works or, more often, to consider both Black artists as “miracles”, an “accidents of nature”. Theoretically, the discussion is nurtured mainly by the reflections of Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (2008), The Wrecked of the Earth (2022), Alienation and Freedom (2020) – W.E.B Du Bois, in The souls of Black Folk (2021) – Achile Mbembe, in Critique of Black Reason (2018), and Necropolitics (2018) – Sueli Carneiro, in A construção do outro como não-ser como fundamento do ser (2005) – Saidiya Hartman, in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2022) – by Henrique Freitas in O Arco e a Arkhé (2016) and by Frank B. Wilderson III, in Afropessimism (2021).