The Power of Naming Brazilian Feminist Anti-racist Intellectuals in Digital Platforms¹

Abstract

This article examines the practice of naming anti-racist women intellectuals as a form of feminist digital activism in Brazil, in tweets referencing Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lélia González. The analysis combines the tools of feminist decolonial digital humanities, intellectual history and what has been called “distant reading”, in order to study the act of naming as a set of techno-discursive practices. It addresses the transnational circulation of tweets, hashtag emergence and relevance, users most frequently mentioned and the topics with greater traction in social networks. The main conclusion is that digital practices of naming Brazilian anti-racist feminist intellectuals on Twitter are powerful tools for creating and mobilising social meanings that: (1) subvert global and intellectual canons and hierarchies; 2) take advantage of the technical possibilities of digital platforms, but instead of privileging advertising and self-promotion, they go against platform determinism and stress an egalitarian logic; and (3) form and maintain collective identities and solidify counterpublics.

Keywords:
feminism; anti-racism; intellectuals; digital platforms

Resumen

Este artículo examina la práctica de nombrar a mujeres intelectuales antirracistas como una forma de activismo digital feminista en Brasil, en tuits que hacen referencia a Carolina Maria de Jesus y Lélia González. El análisis combina las herramientas de las humanidades digitales feministas decoloniales, la historia intelectual y lo que se ha denominado “lectura a distancia”, para estudiar el acto de nombrar como un conjunto de prácticas tecno-discursivas. Aborda la circulación transnacional de tuits, la emergencia y relevancia de los hashtags, los usuarios más mencionados y los temas con mayor tracción en las redes sociales. La principal conclusión es que las prácticas digitales de nombrar intelectuales feministas antirracistas brasileñas en Twitter son herramientas poderosas para crear y movilizar significados sociales que: (1) subvierten los cánones y jerarquías globales e intelectuales; 2) aprovechan las posibilidades técnicas de las plataformas digitales, pero en lugar de privilegiar la publicidad y la autopromoción van contra el determinismo de las plataformas y subrayan una lógica igualitaria; y (3) forman y mantienen identidades colectivas y solidifican contrapúblicos.

Palabras clave:
feminismo; antiracismo; intelectuales; plataformas digitales

Resumo

Este artigo examina a prática de nomear intelectuais femininas antirracistas como forma de ativismo feminista digital no Brasil, em tuítes que fazem referência a Carolina Maria de Jesus e Lélia González. A análise combina as ferramentas das humanidades digitais feministas decoloniais, da história intelectual e do que tem sido chamado de “leitura distante” para estudar o ato de nomear como um conjunto de práticas tecnodiscursivas. Aborda a circulação transnacional dos tuítes, a emergência e relevância das hashtags, os usuários mais citados e os tópicos mais significativos nas redes sociais. A principal conclusão é que as práticas digitais de nomeação de intelectuais feministas antirracistas brasileiras no Twitter são ferramentas poderosas para criar e mobilizar significados sociais que: (1) subvertem cânones e hierarquias intelectuais e globais; 2) aproveitam as possibilidades técnicas das plataformas digitais, mas em vez de privilegiar a publicidade e a autopromoção, vão contra o determinismo das plataformas e sublinham uma lógica igualitária; e (3) formam e mantêm identidades coletivas e solidificam contra-públicos.

Palavras-chave:
feminismo; anti-racismo; intelectuais; plataformas digitais

1. Introduction: the power of naming

Hours before she was assassinated, on March 14^th 2018, Marielle Franco, an anti-racist feminist activist, politician and outspoken critic of police brutality and extrajudicial killings, tweeted from a meeting with feminist anti-racist young women: Today it’s the 104^th anniversary of Carolina Maria de Jesus’ birthday #our steps come a long way” (Franco, 2018)². With her tweet, Franco celebrated the legacy of a Black female intellectual and brought her memory to the present: naming Carolina Maria de Jesus also meant tracing a genealogy of Afro-Brazilian women in the past and connecting it to the present. Aside from the remembrance of her anniversary, naming Carolina was a distinctive performative action: it evoked a feminist, anti-racist tradition of thinkers whose trajectories, thought and writings had been long overlooked and brought that tradition to action. This way, naming Carolina constituted a powerful cultural practice, capable of creating and maintaining collective identities, strengthening citizenship and uniting feminist anti-racist theorists, academics and activists past and present and publics within and outside social movements.

This article examines the practice of naming anti-racist women intellectuals as a form of feminist digital activism in Brazil: it contends that naming serves to unite counterpublics and is a practice of resistance in the context of expanding anti-rights discourses, hate speech, racism and sexism in social platforms (Trindade, 2020; Sivori; Zilli, 2022). I study naming performativity as similar but also different from hashtag performativity: like hashtags, naming transmits affect, argumentation, belonging and dissensus, and like hashtags, naming implies “participating in” a conversation, a discussion, a campaign (Bonilla; Rosa, 2015; Fuentes, 2019; Clark, 2015). Hashtags change rapidly, following socio-historic transformations: they experience peaks and then rapid periods of decay. The practice of naming, differently from hashtags, follows a more prolonged, relatively stable pattern, a slower digital rhythmic structure that is fundamental for creating identities and sustaining long-term communities and actions (Freelon; Mcilwain; Clark, 2016).

The specific relevance of naming for Latin American feminist counterpublics is related to the long-lasting history of feminist and LGBTQIA+ struggles in an exclusionary public sphere (Blay; Avelar, 2017). Since the 19^th century, educated women have used print culture to circulate emancipatory ideas of women’s civic participation and intervention in public life (Masiello, 1992). Feminist and anti-racist counterpublics confronted their marginalisation by developing counter-civil societies in which they were able to develop and share their strategies for social change (Friedman, 2017; Carneiro, 2019; González, 2019). This research shows that the historical power of intellectuals in Latin America resides not only in the political and economic power that resulted from their amply studied relation with educated elites (Altamirano; Myers, 2008; Miceli; Myers, 2019), but also in the power of intellectual genealogies as cultural texts to create and sustain genealogies and identities, to mobilise collectivities and even to potentially catalyse social transformation.

However, until very recently, studies in the field of Latin American intellectual history, when examining the colonial times up to the 20^th century, almost exclusively examined the educated elites, composed of mostly white males, men of letters, be them novelists, journalists, artists, diplomats, revolutionaries, reformers, students, priests, editors, vanguardists; only in the past five to ten years have that field started to gradually incorporate indigenous intellectuals, Afro-Latin Americans, as well as women and LGBTQIA+ subjects (Miceli; Myers, 2019). Over the past decade, a growing number of studies have started giving Latin American female and LGBTQIA+ intellectuals-particularly non-white ones-predominance (Hollanda, 2020; Paiz Carcamo, 2017; Daflon E Sorj, 2020; Josiowicz, 2020). Nevertheless, their place in the intellectual canon is still under dispute. The struggles for their inclusion and legitimation is ongoing, as a diversified undergraduate and graduate population that has entered the university system seeks academic objects of study coherent with their interests and needs.

This article is divided into four sections. This first one is a brief introduction to the main hypothesis. In the second section I develop my theoretical approach. That includes a feminist perspective of Digital Humanities and data feminism, combined with a decolonial approach and an epistemology from the South. The third section includes a description of data collection and processing techniques, as well as an introduction of the feminist intellectuals considered. In the fourth section I perform a feminist techno-discursive critical analysis of the tweets mentioning Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lélia Gonzalez. For that purpose, I analyse the historical flow of tweets, the most frequent hashtags, most referenced usernames and most relevant topics. I use textual analysis tools, such as hashtag and user recognition, and implement a technique for topic modelling. In the fifth and last section, I advance my conclusions.

2. Feminist Decolonial Digital Humanities and Data Feminism

This article examines naming anti-racist feminist intellectuals as performative cultural practice by looking at the techno-discourses that mobilise them and their thought. It combines the tools of a feminist decolonial digital humanities, intellectual history and what has been called “distant reading” (Underwood, 2017; Moretti, 2017), to study naming Latin American feminist anti-racist intellectuals as techno-discursive practices (Paveau, 2021) the codes, narratives and metaphors they catalyse, the rituals associated with them, the sociocultural meanings they help to build and the collective identities they create and maintain. It studies the practice of naming feminist anti-racist intellectuals not focusing on intellectuals as biographical individuals but as techno-discursive performances that anchor collective forces, as social signifiers that weave webs of social meaning in digital platforms (Fuentes, 2019; Josiowicz, 2021). The technodiscoursive performances of naming these intellectuals, understood as meaning-making cultural practices, are capable of integrating collectivities, they structure narratives, codes, myths, establish allies and enemies, through a wide range of rhetorical devices (Alexander, 2011; Brock, 2020). They are embedded in social scripts that produce emotional connection and project cultural meaning; they reenact and reexperience meanings related to the history of exclusion, colonialism, racism and sexism in Latin America.

The perspective of performance studies is important because it points to digital discursive practices’ capacity to intervene, contributing to configure worldviews (Deusdará; Arantes; Eduardo, 2016). Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis has mobilised the perspective of performance studies to examine digital discursive practices as ways of activism, capable of catalysing collective action, constituting communities and counter-communities, acting as ways of protesting and mobilisation of marginalised subjects (Clark, 2015; Brock, 2020; Fuentes, 2019; Josiowicz, 2021). Performance theory understands these practices as citational, iterative practices capable of forming dispersed, interconnected publics and counterpublics, disseminating pedagogies and giving way to future possibilities (Fuentes, 2019).

Following the perspective of digital humanities, or what has been called “distant reading”, this paper enquires into large systems of cultural productions with experimental methods and abstract patterns drawn from the social and computational sciences (Underwood, 2017; Moretti, 2017). However, it also considers the fact that those disciplines have frequently been unreceptive to the consideration of gender, race, ethnicity and global inequalities, and have been unable to deal with inequality and diversity conceptually and in its models (Callaway et al., 2020). I follow the path of pioneer feminist scholars who have studied marginalised publics, particularly communities of women and looked at the meanings they create and the role of culture in their everyday lives, underscoring the agency of reception in cultural products (Masiello, 1992; Josiowicz, 2018). I adopt a feminist digital humanities approach, both in its methods and perspectives, addressing questions of diversity and inclusion, and considering race, gender, privilege, and power (Callaway et al., 2020; D’Ignazio; Klein, 2020). In this research, I utilised digital tools, methods and workflows specifically created, based on the particularities of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking communities of the global South.

In recent years, several approaches based in different fields of study have examined the explosion of intersectional feminist and LGBTQIA+ Latin American digital activism in different digital platforms (Friedman, 2017; Fuentes, 2019; Lourenço Costa; Baronas, 2020; Sivori; Zilli, 2022; Josiowicz, 2021). Feminist digital humanities, data feminism and digital feminism understand data, digital environments and digital research methods informed by an intersectional decolonial feminist approach to technology that considers power inequalities related to gender, race and ethnicity, geopolitical location, language and ability (D’Ignazio; Klein, 2020; Bailey, 2015). Those approaches not only point to the sexism, racism and colonialism that inform media platforms such as Twitter, that are intrinsic part of the architecture and language of algorithms (Benjamin, 2019); they have also mapped the emergence of feminist and anti-racist counterpublics in the Americas that are capable of developing ways of resisting racial, ethnic, gender and geopolitical hierarchies (Friedman, 2017; Fuentes, 2019; Bailey, 2015; Josiowicz, 2021; Knight Steele, 2021). If platforms such as Twitter have allowed and even encouraged, through its algorithmic infrastructure, macro-aggressions directed at non-white women and LGBTQAI+ individuals in Latin America, they have also been catalyzers of feminist social movements, such as the #NiUNaMenos movement in Argentina (Laudano, 2019), the circulation of feminist performances surrounding #Unvioladorentucamino (#aRapistInYourWay) in Chile (Stevani Gisletti; Montero, 2020) and #Elenão (#NotHim) in Brazil (Sivori; Zilli, 2022, p. 28).

This article proposes an epistemology from the South and datafication from below, to be able to examine platforms conceived in the North, such as Twitter, which follows user patterns in English, used by counterpublics in the South, who are Portuguese and Spanish speakers, to deconstruct hierarchies and create potentially disruptive discursive practices (Milan et al., 2019). It adopts a decolonial, intersectional perspective which considers geopolitical, racial, cultural and gendered inequalities (Callaway et al., 2020; D’Ignazio; Klein, 2020). As decolonial studies have pointed out, the unequal distribution of technologies and knowledge does not prevent the production of alternative digital practices in the global peripheries, by supposedly dependent cultures shaped by colonialism (Connel, 2007; Go, 2016). I consider naming as a practice of datafication from below, a meaning-making activity capable of questioning mainstream narratives and of altering democratic practices of participation, reclaiming agency for citizens as individuals and collectives (Milan et al., 2019). Naming Latin American female intellectuals spurs critical consciousness, disentangling the historical invisibility and the subaltern position of Latin American anti-racist feminists; it stimulates data literacy and exercises critical imagination, articulating empowering narratives that enable people to translate experiences of suffering, rejection, subalternisation and racialization.

3. Methodological procedures

In my analysis of tweets referencing Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lélia González, I studied their transnational circulation; the emergence and relevance of hashtags; users most frequently mentioned and the different topics they mobilise in social networks. I employed the Academic Research Track of the Twitter API, released in 2021, which enables researchers to collect tweets from the entire Twitter archive, to collect tweets mentioning the intellectuals from the entire Twitter archive using Twarc, a Python package for collecting Twitter data, developed by Documenting the Now³. For data processing, I utilised quantitative and qualitative research methods implemented in the Software Wolfram Mathematica⁴, which is a high-level programming language and a software system for textual analysis and processing that allows for a wide range of operations and research methods for different types of texts in different formats. Although the latter can be criticised for its geopolitical, gendered and racial hierarchies, I contend that researchers can take advantage of its possibilities, while considering them critically. Because it allows for the construction of programmatic algorithmic architectures capable of operating with languages such as Spanish, Portuguese and others, researchers can make critical decisions in terms of the computational processing of the data. Following ethical guidelines and best research practices suggested in previous studies exploring Twitter data, this study safeguarded users’ privacy, did not disclose personal identification, such as usernames or aliases, and sought authorization when citing entire tweets (Bergis; Summers; Mitchell, 2018; Trindade, 2020).

I collected a total of 48.331 tweets that mentioned Lélia González, the first one posted July 11^th 2009 and the last one January 3^rd 2022. In the case of Carolina Maria de Jesus, I collected a total of 98.851 tweets that mentioned her. The first tweet on her was posted February 9^th 2008 and the last one collected on December 23^rd 2021.

My selection of these two female Brazilian intellectuals responded to different but equally relevant questions. Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977), one of the first and most important Black Brazilian women writers, is also one of the most famous internationally, as her diary Quarto de Despejo, published in Portuguese in 1960 and in English in 1963 as Child of the Dark. The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, won immediate international acclaim and was translated into 14 languages. She was an intellectual, a memorialist, a writer, composer and poet. Although Carolina Maria de Jesus has been frequently reduced to a mere first-hand witness of 1960s favela life, a stereotype reproduced in books, newspapers and essays, she was an intellectual in her own right, a writer with 7 novels, 60 short texts, 100 poems, 4 plays and 12 song lyrics (Fernandez, 2018). During her life, she published three books, leaving most of her work unedited, which is currently being organised, classified and prepared for publication by the prestigious publishing house Companhia das Letras (De Jesus, 2021; 2021b).

Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994), was a Brazilian theorist, politician, professor, anthropologist and human rights activist. She was one of the founders of the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) in Brazil. González wrote many essays and was a pioneer of intersectionality studies, coining the term Amefricanity (Amefricanidade), a broad, encompassing concept, which includes Black and Brown peoples from North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, to convey the idea of an Afro-centred culture, of unity in a shared diasporic history (Gonzalez, 2020; Hasenbalg; Gonzalez, 2022; Gonzalez, 2019). In her 1988 essay “The Political-Cultural Category of Amefricanity”, Gonzalez denounced systemic racism and ethnocentrism in Brazil by arguing that all Brazilians are Amefrican, and affirming that African linguistic, cultural and political heritage is central to Brazilian culture (Gonzalez, 2019). Gonzalez traces racism and sexism in Brazil to historic colonialism and postcolonialism and she affirms that they pervade Brazilian identity into the 20^th century (Gonzalez, 2020). It is important to consider that none of these women received recognition by the intellectual, political and academic establishment at the time of their writings. Only in recent years they have started receiving critical attention, with the publication of anthologies and critical studies on them, which makes the practice of naming them in digital platforms even more powerful. At the same time, their names and works have gone beyond the academic arena and into the public sphere as cultural mediators, particularly in social media.

4. The power of naming Carolina and Lélia

Table 1
Historical Flow of tweets on Lélia Gonzalez and Carolina Maria de Jesus

To begin, table 1 shows the historical flow of tweets on both authors: the practice of naming these intellectuals has become more and more popular in recent months and years, particularly since 2018. This is particularly relevant considering that in Brazil, Twitter’s trending topics are frequently dominated by digital influencers and automated profiles, or bots, deployed by supporters of the far-right. Together with the growth in social media usage in Brazil, hate speech and attacks against women and LGBTQAI+ persons have increased dramatically in recent years and months (Trindade, 2020). Anti-feminist, anti-rights and racist discourses in social media have abounded since 2018, making social media “a laboratory of unregulated forms of violence and conservative pedagogies” (Sivori; Zilli, 2022, P.11;). The table shows that, while rampant sexism and racism predominate on Twitter, the practice of naming Black feminist intellectuals also increases. However, the increase in the volume of mentions of Carolina Maria de Jesus is more remarkable during the last few years, which is partly due to the publication of academic theses and dissertations on her, biographies, a website, collections of her short stories, poems and her complete journals. In the case of Lélia Gonzalez, several cultural and academic institutes have been named after her and her essays have gained new editions since 2020.

Carolina Maria de Jesus is the author with wider and more transnational circulation, as shown in Table 2, which displays the most frequent languages used to post on these intellectuals. Her name circulated in 22 languages, and Lélia Gonzalez’ circulated in 20. Table 2 also shows that, other than Portuguese, both have circulated widely in languages such as English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, as well as in minority languages such as Catalan, Turkish, Romanian, Basque, Haitian, Indonesian and Finish. Maria Carolina de Jesus has had almost twice as many mentions, compared to Lélia Gonzalez, which is partly due to the translation of her diary to 14 languages, while Gonzalez has not yet received equal international attention.

Table 2
Most frequent languages in tweets on Lélia Gonzalez e Maria Carolina de Jesus

Lélia González' tweets		Tuits Maria Carolina de Jesus
Portuguese	43 844	Portuguese	94 083
Spanish	980	Spanish	2 115
English	861	English	1 664
Romanian	602	Unidentified	656
Unidentified	293	Catalan	90
French	98	Turkish	82
Catalan	65	Romanian	53
Basque	32	French	40
Italian	29	German	19
Finnish	22	Italian	13
Haitian	16	Tagalog	11
Tagalog	9	Indonesian	8
Indonesian	4	Japanese	5
Dutch	3	Polish	3
Estonian	2	Estonian	2
Welsh	2	Vietnamese	1

• Source: author and Wolfram Mathematica

The next step was the development of a function that quantifies the use of hashtags to see which were more popular in the tweets for each author. Tables 3 and 4 show the most frequent hashtags for tweets mentioning Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lélia Gonzalez. By means of technowords as # hashtags, Twitter organises tweets in trending topics, which generate groupings and the articulation of meaningful phrases, enabling the creation of channels that connect communities of users interested in the same matters (Paveau, 2021).

Table 3
Most frequent hashtags in Tweets on Carolina Maria de Jesus Source: the Author and Wolfram Mathematica.

Some of the hashtags in tweets on Carolina Maria de Jesus point to anti-racism and Black feminism, such as #diadasmulheres (#WomensDay), #ConsciênciaNegra (#BlackAwareness) and #DiadaConsciênciaNegra (#BlackAwarenessDay). Hashtags also refer to her legacy as a Black woman, in connection with Black Awareness Day and month, as well as with Women’s Day. Hashtags such as #Temgentecomfome (#PeopleAreHungry) and #auxílioMergencial (#EmergencyAid) point to her as a symbol for public policy against poverty and hunger in Brazil, as in the following citation: “Carolina Maria used to say: ‘Hunger was invented by those who can eat’ …”⁵ Tweets defend health and education policies for the disenfranchised and underprivileged, gather support for campaigns against hunger and denounce racial and economic oppression. Counterpublics cite Carolina Maria de Jesus to legitimise their struggles for social democratisation and wealth redistribution. Other hashtags point to her honorary degree, given by the UFRJ, one of the most prestigious institutions in Brazil, and to the Doodle on her made by Google. Hashtag #Nossospassosvemdelonge, included in the aforementioned tweet by Marielle Franco, became an emblematic phrase used by intersectional feminists to establish a connection between present and past anti-racist and feminist activists.

Some tweets stimulate the reading of anti-racist and feminist authors, with hashtags such as: #LeiaMulheres (#ReadWomen); #LeituraPreta (#BlackReads); #CiteBlackWomen (English in the original); #BusquesobreElas (#FindOutAboutThem[Women]); and #BingoLitNegra. The latter was a project that started in 2018 and ended in 2021, which encouraged the reading of Afro-Brazilian authors; it consisted of a Bingo in which users ticked the Black authors that they had read and crossed out authors that they had never read. As one of its main strategies for giving visibility to Afro-Brazilian authors, #BingoLitNegra used the accumulation of Black authors’ names from Latin America, Africa, the United States and other countries. When playing, participants got to read these authors sometimes for the first time. Figure 1 shows an image that exemplifies the game, with the author’s permission. Participants need to fill the spaces with book covers.

Figure 1
Image by #BingoLitNegra

The bingo combines different authors, Brazilian with North American, from different time periods, genres and styles, and different publics, from prestigious literature to genres of mass circulation, such as comics. This way, the Bingo destabilises cultural hierarchies, by connecting Afro-Brazilian culture and world literature, as well as young adult and children’s literature with the literary canon, while honouring and making visible the production and relevance of Afro-Brazilian authors.

Table 4
Most frequent hashtags in Tweets on Lélia González

Table 4 shows the most frequent hashtags on Lélia Gonzalez. Some refer to TV shows, podcasts, documentaries, journals and public personalities, such as university professor and intellectual Silvio Almeida,⁶ and singer and activist Emicida, celebrating Gonzalez’ legacy as an intellectual. She was widely cited in connection with Black Awareness Month and Day, Black Twitter Brazil, and the hashtag #BlackTwitterBr. One hashtag alerted about the Google Doodle on Lélia González’s 85^th birthday, which was released on February 1^st, 2020. The hashtag #VidasNegrasImportam, Portuguese translation of the widely circulated hashtag Black Lives Matter, not only denounces police brutality against black persons in Brazil, but also structural inequalities related to sexism and racism. Gonzalez stands out prominently among these discourses, as a founder of Black Feminism in Latin America. She was mentioned together with Kabengele Munanga, Abdias Nascimento, Milton Santos and others, as a celebration of Black Brazilian intellectuals. Other hashtags such as #CiteBlackWOmen, #IntelectuaisNegres (#BlackIntellectuals [gender-neutral ending]), #livroterapia (#BookTherapy), #minhasreferencias (#MyOwnReferences), #citemulheresnegras (#QuoteBlackWomen) and #BlackWomenRadicals (English in the original) stimulate the reading and naming Brazilian anti-racist female intellectuals. Some announce translations of Gonzalez’s texts in English, others point to the historical invisibility of women, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian subjects in the literary canon, and others explain how reading Gonzalez is a transformative experience for Black women. A young generation of feminist and anti-racist academics and activists emerges in this corpus, one that is aware of concepts such as intersectionality and that is vocal about the importance of reading and studying feminist thinkers such as Gonzalez:

I spent the night surrounded by generous outstanding young Black Brazilian women intellectuals discussing a six-page text by Lélia Gonzalez. To see a text by Lélia treated with the seriousness and zeal it deserves gives one courage at this moment.⁷

In those tweets, Gonzalez is placed at the same level as other (male, white) intellectuals in the canon of Latin American social thought: her thought and writings are the object of lengthy, “serious” and “rigorous” discussions, creating a space of resistance for “young Black Brazilian women intellectuals” in an adverse political context.

Comparing both counterpublics, there are many similarities and points of connection. However, Carolina is more mobilised by activists regarding wealth redistribution and democratisation, centred around poverty and hunger, while Lélia is an emblem of struggles against police brutality. The latter’s role in the formation of the Movimento Negro Unificado also means that she is central for Black Social and Political Movements today: widely mentioned by anti-racist public figures, as a legitimizing presence and an emblem for young afro-Brazilian intellectuals. At the same time, Carolina’s counterpublics are strongly connected with literary studies, while Lélia is mobilised in connection to anthropology, philosophy and racial studies.

The next step was creating a function that quantified the use of @ to identify the accounts that are most frequently referenced and retweeted within the multilingual corpus of tweets. To respect users’ privacy, usernames were removed when they were not public institutions, public persons or communication media. Table 5 shows the users most mentioned in Tweets on Carolina Maria de Jesus. The functions @ (calling on another particular user profile) and RT (retweet) allow for the citation, interpellation, posting and reposting of messages. These operations reveal different kinds of social and cultural interaction in the platform that underscore efforts towards building communities and counterpublics and enhancing interaction among users.

Table 5
Most mentioned users in Tweets on Carolina Maria de Jesus.

Among the users most mentioned, quoted and retweeted in connection with Carolina Maria de Jesus, there are a number of institutions and organisations that promote her legacy in Brazilian culture. Naming Carolina articulates a community of current public intellectuals: writers, translators, professors, journalists and activists. The publishing house that is editing her work, Companhia das Letras, is mentioned, as well as anti-racist organisations, museums and the late Marielle Franco’s account. By marking @change_br, @NetflixBrasil, influencers and activists refer to a petition that asked Netflix to make a documentary film about Carolina, seeking to make her legacy and work more visible. The reference to MTST, official profile of the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto (Brazilian Homeless Workers’ Movement), as well as the references to then former and since reelected, -President Lula da Silva, then candidate and since elected congressman Guilherme Boulos, the São Paulo City Council, and activists and organisations dedicated to giving visibility to the cause and struggles of favela-dwellers, all point to Carolina as an emblem of struggles for social redistribution, giving visibility to the claims of the favela-dwellers’ movement. Mainstream media, journals, the United Nations office in Brazil, and many others have also recuperated the importance of Carolina’s thought and works.

Table 6
Most mentioned users in tweets on Lélia González

Table 6 shows the users that were most mentioned in connection with Lélia Gonzalez. The top user, as well as others whose names are not shown for ethical reasons, are Afro-Brazilian activists, journalists, anti-racist social media influencers as well as academics (sociologists, anthropologists, university professors) from the United States and Brazil, indigenous rights activists and students of the African diaspora: @emicida; @SueliCarneiro (founder of Geledés, the Institute for Black Women in Brazil); @silviolual, Silvio Almeida, Brazilian Minister of Human Rights and Citizenship; and Afro-Brazilian politician Benedita da Silva (@dasilvabenedita), among many others. Mentions include socialist political parties, Afro-Brazilian political figures, university professors and activists, Amnesty International officials, as well as Black women organisations, such as @geledes, alternative media and activists that promote Black feminist culture and reading in Brazil and the United States. They also include mainstream journals and newspapers and important academic publishing houses, such as @editoraZahar, which is publishing her work.

While Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lélia Gonzalez are mobilised by interconnected counterpublics, there are some differences. Many mainstream political candidates and politicians on the left are mentioned in connection with Carolina, as well as favela-dwellers’ organisations and official institutions. Thus, it is plausible that Carolina’s counterpublics might have a relatively more fluid connection with mainstream publics. In the case of Lélia Gonzalez, her counterpublics are connected with academic training in disciplines such as philosophy, Latin American Social Thought, anthropology, sociology, history, feminism and racial studies. Thus, Lélia’s counterpublics are more specialised, trained in specific bodies of thought, and with a focus on Afro-Latin American thought and activism, while Carolina’s counterpublics are more closely connected with mainstream media.

The next step involved several pre-processing techniques on the tweets in Spanish, Portuguese and English, which included stripping the corpus of links, usernames and other non-word characters such as emoticons. After the elimination of stopwords, a lemmatizing technique was implemented.⁸ I performed a technique for topic modelling on tweets in English, Spanish and Portuguese.⁹ I manually selected the five more relevant topics from the 10 topics generated for each author and labelled them according to one of the words with the highest score in each topic. With the selected topics and their labels, I generated several graphs for each language and intellectual in the dataset.¹⁰

Figure 2 shows the topic modelling for tweets in Portuguese on Carolina Maria de Jesus. The topic Doutora Honoris Causa refers to the degree unanimously granted to her by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Tweets in this topic celebrate and honour her thought and work, and her being recognized as an intellectual and thinker in one of the most prestigious academic institutions in Brazil. These tweets point to the diversification of Brazilian academia, and the transformation of its graduate and undergraduate populations in recent years, as more students from marginalised backgrounds have started to pursue academic careers, while struggling for the inclusion of authors and thinkers that had been excluded from the local canons.

Students and faculty share their experiences of reading Carolina in university courses and classes. Some celebrate the fact that their professors introduced Carolina’s works to them: “I remember Quarto de despejo, by Carolina Maria de Jesus. A poor, jobless woman. My teacher made me read a repetitive, great, painful, revealing book”.¹¹ A young teacher in a course who included Carolina in her syllabus laments over persisting prejudice against favelados among her students. With sad irony, the author of the tweet associates these prejudices with the fact that the students themselves deny living in a favela:

Me in my first lesson on Carolina Maria de Jesus, shocked that in TWO divisions some students held the discourse that the favela is an uncivilised place (they used that term). And nobody lives in favelas, they live NEAR one or in a house on a favela STREET.”¹²

In the above cases, Carolina serves as an emblem for the rights of favela-dwellers, their legitimation in university environments and the questioning of ethnocentric discourse. Another student complains that her Portuguese teacher does not know who Carolina is: “I am outraged that my PORTUGUESE teacher does not know who Carolina Maria de Jesus is.”¹³

Those tweets show an important articulation between digital activism and the democratisation of academic institutions and, to some extent, of intellectual canons at large: Carolina Maria de Jesus functions as a model and a mirror for the graduate and undergraduate student populations from underprivileged backgrounds that turn to Twitter to celebrate her legacy and, at the same time, struggle for academic recognition. Her long overdue academic legitimation is also a recognition of their own possible future as intellectuals, as well as of the possibility of Brazil’s cultural democratisation.

Tweets in topic professora include citations from Carolina’s phrases about social and racial inequalities in Brazil, such as “Brazil needs to be conducted by someone who knows what it is to be hungry. Hunger is also a teacher. One who has been hungry learns to think of others.”¹⁴ This topic also includes the names of other anti-racist thinkers of different periods in Brazilian history, such as Sueli Carneiro, Abdias do Nascimento, Lélia Gonzalez, Lima Barreto, Machado de Assis, and it contains the name of Bolsonaro, then Brazilian president, in tweets that denounce his thought and policies: “More Carolina Maria de Jesus, less Bolsonaro”.¹⁵ For these communities of users, Carolina functions as a symbol of resistance to the current political atmosphere, as well to the dominant, most visible Twitter trends.

The topic escritora celebrates her legacy as a writer, multimedia artist, author and a reference of Black feminism in Brazil. Topic favelada underscores her experience living in a favela and as a scrap collector in Sao Paulo. As stated by literary theorist Rafaella Fernandez, Carolina Maria de Jesus has been frequently reduced and degraded to the image of a simple-minded poor woman who was merely a witness of favela life, associated with diminishing, racist and sexist stereotypes (Fernandez, 2018). Tweets resist the reproduction of these stereotypes, as she appears as an intellectual in her own right, a thinker, a memorialist and a writer, whose legacy is honoured and whose thought is mobilised to denounce the oppressions and injustices of the present. Finally, topic racism denounces the many obstacles, including racism and sexism, Carolina had to overcome, as a Black woman, to study, write and fight for her legitimation as a writer and an intellectual.

Among Portuguese-speaking counterpublics, Carolina Maria de Jesus relates to concrete political causes and activism, in tweets supportive of candidates on the left. Likewise, her name is mobilised to criticise and denounce the far-right Brazilian president and to call for elections.

Figure 2
Topic modelling for tweets in Portuguese on Carolina Maria de Jesus

Figure 3 shows the topic modelling for tweets in English on Carolina Maria de Jesus. Her book Child of the Dark (English translation for her Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada) appears, as many users recommend it and invite people to read it, some of them as part of courses on Latin American culture and society in academic institutions in the United States. Topic Woman highlights her legacy and history, and the success of her books among international readers, and refers to the Doodle google made for her birthday, which enhanced her international visibility. The topic racism points to the discrimination and difficulties she had to overcome. Topic Brazil, on the other hand, celebrates the legacy and recognition of Latin American women writers, including Clarice Lispector, one of the most transnational Brazilian women writers.

Carolina circulates among a general literary international reading public in English, as a bestseller. Among Anglo-Saxon publics she is mobilised in connection with international Women’s Day, as well as in causes against children’s hunger and poverty. However, there is no such direct connection to political causes or political candidates as there is among Portuguese counterpublics:.

Figure 3
Topic modelling for tweets in English on Carolina Maria de Jesus

Figure 4 shows the topic modelling for tweets on Carolina Maria de Jesus in Spanish. Here, the topic Doctora Honoris Causa celebrates her academic recognition by Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. The topic mujeres includes tweets with citations by Carolina Maria de Jesus in which she points to a history of intersectional oppression experienced by women in Latin America. The topic Clarice Lispector mentions several Brazilian women writers, including Lispector, Marina Colasanti and Lygia Fagundes Telles, honouring their legacy and pointing to the many difficulties and obstacles they had to overcome. The topic exposición refers to the exhibit on her work at the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, and the topic Editorial to the publication of some of her writings, including her diary, in Spanish by an alternative publishing house, and to the book launch. Among Carolina’s counterpublics, there is an increasing interest in the new editions of her work, which helps situate her audiences in the Americas, particularly in Brazil, the United States, the Southern Cone and Colombia. Among Brazilian counterpublics, Carolina is politicised in a way we do not see among other counterpublics. In English, there is an effort to make her work better-known and has been included in academic courses.

Figure 4
Topic modelling for tweets in Spanish on Carolina Maria de Jesus

Figure 5
Topic modelling for tweets in Portuguese on Lélia Gonzalez

Figure 5 shows the topic modelling on tweets on Lélia Gonzalez in Portuguese. Here, the topics intelectuais negras (black intellectuals), connects her with other important thinkers, such as Lima Barreto, Beatriz Nascimento, Sueli Carneiro, Teresa de Benguela, Conceição Evaristo, Florestan Fernandes, Achille Mbembe, which denounced the legacy of colonialism and racism. The topic Consciência establishes a genealogy of anti-racist thinkers, activists and intellectuals, citing Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Morgan Freeman, Desmond Tutu, Frantz Fanon, and many others who denounced discrimination and racial inequality. The topic memória connects her with a Brazilian tradition of social and political intellectuals and thinkers that include Virginia Bicudo, Guerreiro Ramos, Paulo Freyre, Abdias do Nascimento, and other world anti-racist thinkers and activists, such as Angela Davis. Black woman highlights her legacy to Black and intersectional feminism, also mentioning Teresa de Benguela and Marielle Franco, all of whom denounced the violence against Black women since colonial times. The topic pensadoras creates another genealogy of Brazilian and world anti-racist thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Kabengele Munanga, Milton Santos and Achille Mbembe.

Lélia’s Portuguese-speaking counterpublics are strongly connected to a tradition of anti-racist movements in Brazil and across the world, and to an intellectual genealogy of social and political thinkers. They are mainly focused on anti-racism, and on the intellectual traditions of Afro-Brazilian and African diasporic social and political thought.

Lélia is also mentioned among counterpublics of students who protest against the traditional exclusion of Afro-Brazilian women from university courses. A graduate student states:

I attended a class by Angela Davis in grad school and she highlighted contributions by Lélia Gonzalez e Carolina Maria de Jesus. Then I remember that in high school and college my Brazilian teachers (most of them white men) neither cited nor suggested books by Black women writers.¹⁶

Both Lélia and Carolina function as emblems of new kinds of academic knowledge, the emergence of new topics and new questions. Others highlight the fact that Lélia Gonzalez was a professor in a time in which Black persons in Brazil were excluded from intellectual canons. This way, tweets question traditional academic hierarchies and bring their struggles to the present.

Figure 6
Topic modelling for tweets in English on Lélia Gonzalez

Figure 6 shows a graph with selected topics from the topic modelling on tweets on Lélia Gonzalez in English. Here, the topic Latinidade underscores Gonzalez’s role in theorising the struggles for indigenous, Black and Latinx’s rights, mentioning African diasporic intellectuals and politicians, and pointing to the legacy of racial and social inequality. The topic Feminist Scholar underscores Gonzalez’s legacy as an anthropologist, activist, writer and philosopher and the way in which she has inspired a generation of anti-racist decolonial thinkers through the concept of Amefricanity. The topic Black movement honours her legacy as an activist and a scholar in the African diaspora. Finally, topic Brazilian celebrates her birthday and mentions the doodle made to honour her intellectual legacy.

Lélia’s English-counterpublics are mainly based in the United States, and many of them are academics who circulate articles that recuperate her legacy. These publics are well-trained in academic concepts and readings on Latin American social thought. This is different from the less-specialised nature of Carolina’s publics and their debates and is fueled by a transnational academic dialogue on questions of gender and race that connects knowledge production and activism. Users who are university professors highlight their efforts at including Black Brazilian authors in courses on Latin American studies, responding to students’ interests and their own preoccupations.

Figure 7
Topic modelling for tweets in Spanish on Lélia Gonzalez

Figure 7 shows the topic modelling on tweets in Spanish on Lélia Gonzalez. The topic intelectual highlights her legacy as an anthropologist, a professor, a politician, a philosopher and a historian, as well as an activist; it also points to the importance of the concept of Amefrica Ladina and amefricanidade, to think of a shared diasporic unity that includes Black and Brown peoples from North, South and Central America and the Caribbean (Gonzalez, 2019). The topic intersección points to her as a pioneer of the concept of intersectionality, as she denounced racism and sexism and non-white women’s history of oppression. The topic feminista recognizes the relevance of her thought and her contribution to feminism and anti-racism in Latin America. The topic Amefricanidade raises the concept she coined and her trajectory as an Afro-Latin American woman, naming important feminist anti-racist intellectuals such as Angela Davis and Marielle Franco. The topic afrolatinoamericana announces the publication of an anthology of her texts in Brazil and stimulates the reading of her works.

Lélia’s Spanish-speaking counterpublics are based mainly in Mexico and South America, with an emphasis on the Global South, and use Twitter to circulate information on her through blogs, collective feminist accounts, alternative digital spaces as well as academic articles.

5. Conclusions: naming performativity, data democratisation and the making of a feminist anti-racist intellectual tradition

The practice of naming works in three fundamental ways among Spanish, Portuguese and English-speaking counterpublics. Firstly, by constructing a genealogy of intellectuals from North and South, it subverts global hierarchies and previously established cultural canons. It deploys a decolonial approach to datafication, as it establishes non-hierarchical horizontal relations and comparisons between North and South, bringing together anti-racist and feminist philosophers, thinkers and intellectuals from Africa, the United States, in Caribbean and Latin America since colonial times. On the one hand, this not only legitimises Brazilian figures, but it also subverts cultural canons in which they have historically taken a marginal place. On the other hand, naming subverts Latin American cultural and intellectual hierarchies. It traces new intellectual lineages that position previously disenfranchised subjects at the centre, as theorists and activists, pioneers and founders of intellectual lineages and traditions. It inverts the privilege of high versus popular culture, giving visibility to feminist Afro-Brazilian intellectuals that have until recently been excluded or marginalised in academic spaces.

There are some differences between each author’s counterpublics, as one is broader and more closely connected with mainstream publics and to an activism of a more general social sort, while the other is more specific and closer to Brazilian social thought and to formal anti-racist movements. There are also differences between languages, as Brazilian counterpublics are strongly connected to local activism and political causes, making statements about current politics, while English- and Spanish-speaking ones are mostly activist and academic, less connected to party politics, but with an interest in Brazilian cultural production. Both counterpublics are part of an ongoing impulse in academia to give voice and visibility to new or newly recognized intellectuals that reflect the preoccupations of younger generations of students who denounce historic injustices and exclusions and transform the way in which academic prestige, relations and knowledge are reflected upon.

Secondly, naming takes advantage of the technical possibilities of digital platforms. By their means, hashtags, trending topics, retweets, user mentions, images and emoticons are combined with multimedia tools to fulfil users’ purposes. However, this use is not a naïve or uncritical pursuit regarding the priorities of digital platforms; engaged users resist commercialization and individualization. Instead of privileging advertising and self-promotion, as the algorithm infrastructure stimulates, they recognize their interconnectedness and stress an egalitarian logic. Naming goes beyond platforms’ determinisms and develops innovative collective practices that subvert the monetization and reification that predominate in these platforms.

Thirdly, naming constitutes a collective technique of identity formation and maintenance, as it helps unite and solidify counterpublics. It creates collective genealogies, a chorus that instead of excluding or separating, invites individuals, past and present, old and young, to join. These engaged counterpublics maintain and recreate identities, strengthening and emphasising union instead of separation, empathy instead of indifference. The collective power of naming strengthens through repetition, citation and sharing, rather than exclusivity and privilege, thus reinforcing those collectivist principles.

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• 1
  This paper was first presented as a guest talk at the University of Richmond, I would like to thank Mariela Méndez for her comments and generosity on that occasion. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. The author is Professora Adjunta in the Department of Letras Neolatinas (LNEO), faculty of the Graduate Program in Letras (concentration in Linguistics) and Head of Internationalisation at the Instituto de Letras (ILE), State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Prociência Fellow (UERJ-FAPERJ) 2021-2024 and Jovem Cientista do Nosso Estado (JCNE-FAPERJ).
• 2
  Original in Portuguese: “… hoje faz 104 anos do nascimento de Carolina Maria de Jesus. #NossosPassosVemDeLonge”.
• 3
  https://github.com/DocNow/twarc.
• 4
  https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/.
• 5
  Original in Portuguese: “Carolina Maria de Jesus já dizia: ‘Quem inventou a fome são os que comem’….”
• 6
  On January 1st, 2023, Prof. Almeida was named Minister of Human Rights and Citizenship by the newly elected President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.
• 7
  Original in Portuguese: “Passei a noite rodeada de jovens intelectuais negras brasileiras generosas e geniais discutindo um texto de seis páginas de Lélia Gonzalez. Ver um texto de Lélia tratado com a seriedade e o zelo que merece é um alento nesse momento.”
• 8
  I applied in Wolfram Mathematica the Spanish and Portuguese Stemming algorithm available at: http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/portuguese/stemmer.html and http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/spanish/stemmer.html.
• 9
  The technique used was matrix factorization, particularly NonNegativeMatrix Factorization, and in this case Probabilistic Latent Analysis. I used a package created for Wolfram Mathematica (Antonov, 2020), which allows for topic extraction from a collection of documents.
• 10
  See Steinskog, Therkelsen and Gamback (2017); Wang, Liu and Yalou (2016) for sources on tweet modelling techniques.
• 11
  Original in Portuguese: “Lembro do quarto de despejo da autora Carolina Maria de Jesus. Mulher, pobre, catadora. Minha professora me fez ler um livro repetitivo, grandioso, dolorido e revelador.” Quarto de Despejo: Diário de uma favelada (1960) was first translated to English as Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962. Later on as As Beyond All Pity, London, UK: Souvenir Press, 1962; Panther, 1970; Earthscan, 1990.
• 12
  Original in Portuguese: “Eu na primeira aula sobre a Carolina Maria de Jesus chocada que em DUAS turmas tiveram alunos com o discurso de que a favela é um lugar sem civilização (com esse termo). E ninguém mora na favela, eles moram PERTO da favela ou numa casa NA RUA da favela.”
• 13
  Original in Portuguese: “Estou indignada sobre minha professora de PORTUGUÊS não saber quem é Carolina Maria de Jesus.”
• 14
  Original in Portuguese: “O Brasil precisa ser dirigido por uma pessoa que já passou fome. A fome também é professora, aquele que passa fome aprende a pensar no próximo.”
• 15
  Original in Portuguese: “Mais Carolina Maria de Jesus, menos Bolsonaro!”
• 16
  Original in Portuguese: “Assisti a uma aula da Angela Davis na pós e ela destacou as contribuições de Lélia Gonzalez e Carolina Maria de Jesus. Aí lembrei que na escola e na graduação meus professores (a maioria homens brancos), brasileiros, nem citavam, nem indicavam livros escritos por mulheres negras.”

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Oct 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  20 June 2022
• Accepted
  15 July 2022