Homoerotic violence in colonial Brazil: African resistance and ethical praxis

A seminar in partnership with the UCT School of Languages and Linguistics: Spanish Section.

This seminar engages with black male students in Africana philosophy to rethink the rape of enslaved Black men from their cultural and ethical perspectives. Philosopher Tom Curry’s concepts of racist misandry and phallicism, drawn from the emerging field of Black Male Studies, serve as a critique of Portuguese patriarchy, which reduced African men to the status of “the Man Not” to Frantz Fanon’s “zone of non-being”. Phallicism illuminates how racialised men are depicted as sexual predators even as they are rendered sexual prey. The seminar addresses the epistemological void within Brazilian gender studies regarding the humanity of male rape victims. It also engages the West-Central African notion of mûntu-walunga, which in Kikonko means “a spiritually fulfilled man”. This Kongolese concept of personhood enables an inquiry into the nature of the harm engendered by sexual violence, while also theorising the indigenous ethical practices African men adopted to defend and restore their humanity.

Matthew Pettway is Associate Professor of Spanish and African-American Studies at the University of South Alabama, United States. His research examines African conceptions of gender, sexuality, and kinship in colonial Brazil. He is the author of Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection (2019) and has published widely in English and Spanish. A 2024–2025 Fulbright Scholar to Brazil, he has conducted archival research in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon.