By PETRÔNIO DOMINGUES*
Clóvis Moura's work is an original record of black agency in the history of Brazil, questioning the postulates of traditional historiography and sociology.
Clóvis Steiger de Assis Moura was a black intellectual sui generis. Throughout his life, he dedicated himself to various activities as a journalist, poet, historian, sociologist and Marxist thinker. Clóvis Moura was born in Amarante, a municipality in the state of Piauí, on June 10, 1925. Therefore, this year of 2025, the centenary of his birth will be completed.
Due to the importance of this intellectual for Brazilian social thought, several events and activities in his honor are planned to take place throughout the year, of which I highlight the publications (two collections will be edited, and the author of this article is organizing one of these collections), a virtual exhibition, which aims to recount aspects of his biography and his intellectual production and political activism; and a study and training seminar, whose purpose is to bring together specialists in his work and thought.
Regarding Clóvis Moura's life, as a child, he moved with his family to the city of Natal. During his adolescence, the family moved again, this time to Salvador, where he joined a circle of young intellectuals from Salvador. During the 1940s, he lived for a period in Juazeiro, in the backlands of Bahia, when he joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and his literary, political and intellectual interests intensified. From there, he moved to São Paulo, where he pursued a career as a journalist, in various roles and for different media outlets, in the capital and in the interior.
Alongside journalism, he devoted himself to political and intellectual activities. In 1959, he published his first book, slave quarters rebellions, which presented an innovative approach: understanding the black experience in Brazil in light of historical materialism. The book sought to counter the conception that, in Brazil, harmonious slave relations were engendered, an old idea echoed by Gilberto Freyre in the early 1930s.[I]
Taking the dynamics of slave society as a key to violence and, above all, resistance to the regime of captivity, Clóvis Moura focused his attention on the revolts and quilombos in various regions of Brazil, their forms of organization, their projects for freedom, their strategies of struggle, their relations with the surrounding society and with other social and political movements. In addition to pointing to the quilombola rebellion as an expression of the fundamental contradiction of the slave system, Moura highlighted the active role of the black population in the civilizational formation of the nation, not only from a cultural point of view, but also from a social, political and economic point of view.
After that, he published other works, such as Introduction to the thought of Euclides da Cunha (1964) Color prejudice in cordel literature (1976) The black man: from good slave to bad citizen? (1977) Sociology called into question (1978) and Diary of the Araguaia Guerrilla (1979). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Clóvis Moura became close to sectors of the Black Movement, which recognized him as one of their great intellectual mentors. This process of dialogue between Moura and black activists became stronger in the 1980s and 1990s, when new publications came to light: Quilombos and the black rebellion (1981); Brazil: the roots of black protest (1983); Quilombos: resistance to slavery (1987); Sociology of the Brazilian black (1988); History of black people in Brazil (1989) e Clio's injustices: black people in Brazilian historiography (1990). His latest books were: The sociology of peasant war: from Canudos to the MST (2000) The crossroads of the orixás: problems and dilemmas of the black Brazilian (2003) and, posthumously, Dictionary of black slavery in Brazil (2004)
Clóvis Moura's work is an original record of black agency in the history of Brazil, questioning the postulates of traditional historiography and sociology, which tended to conceal or relegate to a secondary role the role of this segment of the population in the formation and development of the nation. In addition to demonstrating the proactive participation of people of African origin in the construction of Brazilian society, Clóvis Moura sought to inventory the radical black tradition in its tireless battle, sometimes for the conquest of freedom during the period of slavery, and sometimes for the conquest of equality in the field of rights and citizenship, in the post-Abolition period.
Clóvis Moura passed away in the city of São Paulo in 2003, leaving behind a vast body of work. An erudite intellectual, he did not receive the space he deserved in the academic world during his lifetime, nor the recognition he deserved in the history of Brazilian black intellectuals. Perhaps because he was an outlier. A Marxist, he advocated the construction of an egalitarian society and never separated the anti-racist struggle from the class struggle, which made him critical of paradigms that emphasized the recognition of the Brazilian racial issue detached from the capitalist formation or, rather, articulated anti-racism dissociated from an emancipatory project of structural transformation of society.
Recently, however, the life, work and thought of Clóvis Moura have been studied and discussed in various research projects (master's, doctorate, journal articles, chapters in collections, monographs and even a biography), in different areas, from different points of view. His work has been re-edited, dossiers dedicated to him have been published, such as the one in the magazine Social Struggles (PUC-SP), in the two issues of 2023; and a series of debates and events, of an academic and political nature, have taken place, highlighting its importance, both for Brazilian social thought and for the clashes around race and class.
May this year of Clóvis Moura's centenary deepen this process of recognition worthy of this black intellectual, who was a relevant interpreter of Brazil and left a fruitful contribution to thinking about the nation's dilemmas, impasses and challenges. His critical stance signals that, in addition to delving into the past in order to better understand the present, it is possible to glimpse another future: a more inclusive, democratic and equitable Brazil.
*Petrônio Domingues He is a professor of history at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS). Author, among other books, of Black protagonism in São Paulo (Sesc Editions). [https://amzn.to/4biVT9T]
Note
[I] Part of this text was based on “Clóvis Moura and his Brazilian revolution”. Mail Braziliense, 20/01/2024, article by Petrônio Domingues and Marcio Farias.
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