Transformation of the Self in a Time of Chaos

Abstract

This essay looks at the intellectual relationship between author Angela Gilliam and Afro-Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. In 1968, both Gilliam and Nascimento were involved in self-examination and reinvention in terms of the positive affirmation of blackness and politicization of racial consciousness. This was a crucial time of social change and political struggle for equal rights to citizenship in Brazil and the United States. It was in her interpreter-translator work for Nascimento that Gilliam’s relationship to cultural and political expressions of peoples of African descent became deepened. This essay is a longer version of the lecture she delivered during the 2015 Abdias Nascimento symposium held at Brown for which she sent to us to include in this special issue before her passing in September 2018.