antropologia política – Art * Music* Architecture * Sciences * Cinema * Theater * Cirque * Forain *

inlinguagem 🇫🇷 – Rio de Janeiro 18.02.1988

Lélia Gonzalez (February 1, 1935 – July 10, 1994 – 10 July 1994 – unfortunately deceased..) was a Brazilian intellectual, politician, professor, anthropologist and a woman human rights defender. The daughter of a black railroad worker and an indigenous maid, she was the second youngest of eighteen siblings, including footballer Jaime de Almeida, who played for Flamengo. Born in Belo Horizonte, she moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1942. She graduated with a degree in history and philosophy, then worked as a public school teacher. She did her master’s degree in media, and her doctorate in political anthropology. She then began to devote herself to research on the relationship between gender and ethnicity. She taught Brazilian Culture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, where she headed the department of sociology and politics. As a secondary school teacher at CAp-UERJ (part of Rio de Janeiro State University) during the dictatorship of the sixties, she made her philosophy classes a space of resistance and sociopolitical critique, which influenced the thought and action of her students. She helped found institutions such as the Black Movement of Brazil, Research Institute of Black Cultures (Instituto de Pesquisas das Culturas Negras, IPCN), the Black Women’s Collective, N’Zinga, and the group Olodum. Her activism in defense of black women carried it to the National Council on Women’s Rights, where she worked from 1985 to 1989. She was a federal legislative candidate for the Workers’ Party, being chosen as the first alternate. In the next election, in 1986, she ran for state representative for the Democratic Labour Party, being chosen again as a substitute. Her writings, simultaneously permeated by the scenarios of political dictatorship and the emergence of social movements, reveal her interdisciplinary commitment and portrait a constant concern in articulating the broader struggles of Brazilian society with the specific demand of blacks and especially of black women^[1] In 1982, together with Carlos Hasenbalg, she published Lugar de Negro^[2] and in 1987, she published the book Festas populares no Brasil.