Abstract: Dispositivo de racialidade: a construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser, Sueli Carneiro, explores racism in Brazil from the Foucaultian perspective. Published in 2023, the book addresses the hegemonic self and the subjugation of the “other”, offering a detailed and critical study of Brazilian racism, but with a complex approach that can limit its accessibility to the non -academic public.

Keywords: Racial device, racism, and self.

Dispositivo de racialidade: a construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser is the latest work of Sueli Carneiro. The production, published in 2023 by the publisher Zahar, is the outcome of the PhD in Education from the University of São Paulo, completed in 2005. The initial question elaborated for the thesis and that reaches the editorial market in book format was: “It is possible to operationalize Rials as a device of power, as conceived by Michel Foucault for the field of sexuality? ” Yara Frateschi, Professor at the Department of Philosophy of Unicamp, writes a considerable afterword that enables a better understanding of the philosophical sheep writing. Abdias Nascimento’s artistic creation (1988) was chosen by designer and illustrator Elisa von Randow to stamp the cover.

Sueli Carneiro, one of the most vigorous contemporary Brazilian intellectual intellectuals, expresses his philosophical and educational performance beyond the academic field. Through resistance and struggles in this environment, she established her political philosophy by defending her thesis, scientifically applying Western culture to decipher the nuances of racism in Brazil. Sueli Carneiro is a black woman, public intellectual, writer, philosopher, activist of the black movement, the feminist movement and defender of human rights, demonstrating a multifaceted and influential role. She founded and coordinates Geledés – Black Women’s Institute. Throughout his career, he has published numerous essays and articles, highlighting his works “Racism, Sexism and Inequality in Brazil” in 2011 and “Writings of a Life” in 2019. His academic and philosophical research is based on race discussions, Gender and class. In March 2023, she stood out as the first black woman to be honored with the title of Doctor Honoris causa by the University of Brasilia (UnB).

Four Foucaultian categories – device, biopower, resistance and self -care – structure Sueli Carneiro’s book. Charles Mills’ racial contract theory and Martin Heidegger’s Ontological and Ontological Concepts are used to substantiate their reflections on the hegemonic self as being and the other as not being. These are the main pieces employed by ram to compose a precise and singular study on racism in Brazil. Three parts make up the work, the first power, knowledge and subjectivation, the concepts of device and biopower are uncovered and operationalized, based on the notion of racial device. In the second part, entitled Resistances, it presents stories of activists and militants with the clear purpose of exposing lives as acts/practices of identity and black consciences, both individually and collectively. In the third part, named education and self -care, life testimonies are resumed, real stories of non -assigning, confrontation in the educational, institutional and political fields, based on militancy.

In part I, Carneiro presents the concept of Foucault device, a power mechanism that operates in a particular field of knowledge with strategic objectives constituted in historical becoming. The device establishes divisions for ontological purposes, example: the mental health device is the normal and the pathological. Ahead, the device of sexuality is placed as a strategy of the bourgeoisie and as a class distinction, invested over the female body, its technology builds the ideal of bourgeois body, making it a reference of humanity, of being. The philosopher complements the Foucaultian vision by operating with the racial device taking skin color as new status and safely states that the devices of sexuality and raciality are imbricated and operate aligned in the definition of hegemonic self – endowed with rationality, whiteness and which inscribes the other in the sign of death. By intertwining Foucault and Charles Mills, uses the thought of the African-American philosopher to claim that the device of raciality has historically structured in/ by non-white representations with the expeditions of achievements in the fifteenth century, that is, well before 18th century, in which the French philosopher points to the emergence of devices in a disciplinary society. Mills does not use Foucaultian thinking, but ram articulates them and understands that technologies of power and knowledge have established realities of domination and hierarchy of races. The philosopher states that thus was organized the neocolonial imperialist policy, based on a racialized reason and the ideal of European superiority, so well defended by two exponents of Western philosophy: Kant and Hegel.

In the same line of reasoning, Carneiro resumes Foucault’s concept of biopower to claim that racism as a state policy has as much positive as negative aspects, promotes the lives of those considered racially superior and inscribes the degenerate under the sign of death. Biopolitics establishes a separation in the biological field and naturalizes the elimination of what is considered the other, the white population will remain by eliminating non -white. The forms of death promotion for inferior racials have differentiations according to gender, for black women prevenable deaths such as maternal death and avoidable diseases such as uterine fibroids, and hysterectomy is a sterilization technology, pure eugenics. For the black man, violent death.

The philosopher also dialogues with Boaventura de Souza Santos through the concept of epistemicide and thus evidences how forms of ethnic and racial domination were based on the denial and dismissal of the other’s rationality. There is an interdiction to the black, disabled it as a human being.

In Part II, Sueli Carneiro, when using the concept of resistance in Foucault, makes it clear that it applies it from a community and is intended to highlight the formation of collective subjects. To this end, the philosopher resorts to the method of testimonies of Edson Carneiro, Sônia Maria Pereira Nascimento, Fatima de Oliveira and Arnaldo Xavier and thus demonstrates how the raciality device elaborates its own struggle strategies. Staying alive is the first act in a course that is also guided by the freedom of reason and the break with the discourses/practices of racial domination. They are life stories of black men and women who express positive modes of subjectivation, autonomy and knowledge/power.

In Part III, it comprises education and self -care as political acts and as means to resist various actions of subjecting within and outside school and academic institutional spaces, for which, “the black body is, in itself, a transgression itself. ”. By interspersing fragments of testimonies with theoretical analyzes, Sueli Carneiro enables the understanding of how “the construction of collective subjects freed from the processes of subjugation and subordination”. It also widens how Brazilian educational spaces structured in racism put ongoing the elimination of the bodies and minds of labeled as “maladjusted” and “irrational”, fragmenting their subjectivities and imposing western values as civilizing norms.

Even in the face of precise conceptual analyzes, Carneiro reproduces the habit of philosophers to speak to peers, breaking with common sense, does not make their political philosophy and the structuring of a new concept become accessible to the non-academic world, although Critically stimulate studies and research on racism in Brazil. Moreover, it does not instrumentalize the concept of Foucault’s resistance in such a detail, as well as operates with the concepts of device, biopower and self -care.

We must recognize conceptual accuracy, logical rigor and critical thinking under which the work is built. Throughout the book, philosopher Sueli Carneiro demonstrates that the academy did not subject her and she resisted the attempts of epistemicide, was not interdicted by scientific common sense. This production published in this year was prepared in the early twentieth century, until then it was limited to the public of students and researchers circumscribed to the São Paulo academic space or those who were directed there with the clear objective of accessing this academic writing. Now she comes to several hands, enabling readings and interpretations that can structure specific studies and research on racism. As well as safeguard a precious and potent academic study of one of the most active Brazilian intellectuals in contemporary times.

By operationalizing Foucaultian thinking very well, philosopher Sueli Carneiro builds the concept of raciality device and fulfills it with its goal, that is, to scan discourses and practices that structure racism in Brazil. As Yara Frateschi says, we did not find in the book a repetition of concepts, but the construction of a “new conceptual architectural”, very combative and political, an anti -racist struggle. The work, therefore, must be read by all who study and research on racial issues in Brazil, keeping in mind that it will understand political philosophy through much disposition and review of their understandings. Familiar with ram writing and going back to the introduction, we understand the call for the dialogue between the other and the hegemonic self, between non-white and white.

Summary of Dispositivo de racialidade: a construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser

• Introdução: Emancipação para todos
• Apresentação: O Ser e o Outro
• I. Poder, saber e subjetivação
  • 1. Do dispositivo:
  • 2. O biopoder: Negritude sob o signo da morte
  • 3 Epistemicídio
  • 4 Interdições
• II. Resistências
  • 1 Edson Cardoso
  • 2 Sônia Maria Pereira Nascimento
  • 3 Fátima Oliveira
  • 4 Arnaldo Xavier, o poeta (In memorian)
• III. Educação e o cuidado de si
  • 1 Educação: Negação e afirmação
  • 2 Educação e o cuidado de si
• Fluxograma: Articulações funcionais entre saber, resistência e raça
• Posfácio: A filosofia prática de Sueli Carneiro – Yara Frareschi
• Agradecimentos
• Notas
• Referências bibliográficas
• Créditos das imagens
• Sobre a autora
• Créditos

Reviewer

Luciana Vilela Dourado Matos, Professor of Basic Education in the State of Bahia, Degree in History (UNEB), Specialist in Higher Education Methodology (UFMA), Master in Social Sciences (PPGCS/UFMA) with the dissertation Iagens legadas: São Luís nas fotografias de Gaudêncio Cunha, master’s student in the Graduate Program in Estudos Africanos, Povos Indígenas e Culturas Negras (UNEB). Published As cidades de Cícero Matos. Redes sociais: @lucianavilelamatos; ID LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/9805950276303841; ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6804-7015; E-mail: luciana.matos6@enova.educacao.ba.gov.br.

To cite this review

CARNEIRO, Sueli. Dispositivo de racialidade: A construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2023, 431p. Review by MATOS, Luciana Vilela Dourado. Racism in Brasil. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.13, Sep/Oct, 2023. Available at <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/racismo-no-brasil-luciana-vilela-dourado-matoss-uneb-review-of-dispositivo-de-racialidade-a-construcao-do-outro-como-nao-ser-como-fundamento-do-ser-by-sueli-carneiro/>.

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Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n. 13, Sep/Out, 2023 | ISSN 2764-2666