“Negro Drama”: Beyond the Colonial Family Romance in Brazilian Hip-Hop

Abstract

Hegemonic actors, agencies, and institutions represent Brazil as a postcolonial nation built upon interracial mixture and racial harmony. This relies on the Brazilian White mestiço’s romanticized colonial narrative between the Portuguese master/colonizer, the enslaved African woman, and their mixed-race progeny. Yet this obscures the brutal symbolic and material exclusions that Black Brazilians experience. As such, this article turns to Racionais MCs, Brazil’s most famous rap group, and their song “Negro Drama” to analyze Brazil through the genre of tragedy and critique Brazil’s colonial family romance. Drawing on postcolonial studies and Black diasporic feminisms, it argues that group members Edi Rock and Mano Brown, in their lyrics, refuse the symbolic White father and his romanticizing national imaginary and instead identify with the Black mother to depict the materiality of Black life on the stage of tragedy. It concludes by acknowledging the song’s ideological racial interventions and gendered limitations as a singular text of tragedy.