Brazilian Disputed Imaginaries: Graphic Humour in the Black and Indigenous Press in the 1970s–1980s

Abstract

This chapter, anchored in the contemporary Brazilian political context, looks at the struggles of so-called minority: movements such as the Black Movement and the movement for the affirmation of the rights of the Indigenous populations, against the authoritarianism of the military regime from the mid-1970s until 1985, and the many tensions characterising the context of elaboration of a new project of nation until the Constitution of 1988. During the 1970s, numerous illustrated publications emerged from militant, civil rights-based groups in Brazil, making it possible to trace both their insertion into a group of militant forces against authoritarianism and the marginalisation they were often the object, within the opposition itself. The graphic forms of political humour published in some of these independent and militant publications trace and draw the tensions, contradictions, and internal conflicts of the opposition movements to the military regime which, from 1985 onwards, engaged in the reconstruction of the country. A real gateway to the political cultures of the time, they also reveal the power and strength of the concrete demands of Black and Indigenous Brazilian groups determined to fight against authoritarianism, racism, and the blatant inequalities in Brazil, in both dictatorial and then democratic contexts.