Poetry and the Visual Slavery Archive in Brazil with Luciany Aparecida

The Institute of the Arts and Sciences invites you to an evening of poetry and conversation with Luciany Aparecida, author of Macala (2022) and Aziri (2026), among other works. These books of poetry are inspired by nineteenth-century photographs of Black women taken in Brazil, shaped by the historical contexts of slavery and scientific racism. The research explores how poetry and fiction can reinscribe these images beyond the colonial gaze that originally produced them. Once confined within systems of economic exploitation and the aesthetic contemplation of whiteness, these women are now reimagined through a poetic practice in which poetry and photography converge as a feminist and abolitionist mode of critically engaging the archive. Following the wake, the work seeks to transform documents of violence into new aesthetic forms of freedom.

This event is organized by lawyer and professor Denise Carrascoa, Visualizing Abolition Scholar in Residence.

Luciany Aparecida is a writer as well as a psychoanalyst in training. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature, with research focused on literature and culture. She is the author of Mata Doce, a novel, winner of the 2024 São Paulo Literature Award and finalist for the 2024 Jabuti Prize. She also is the author of two poetry collections: Aziri (2016) and Macala (2022), as well as Joanna Mina (2021), a play. Aparecida is a researcher with the Black Ancestry Literature Group at PUCSP and was a guest writer in Berlin at the Middle Ground 2025 Festival; in Mexico at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2025; in Colombia at the Bogotá International Book Fair in 2024; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the FLUP 2024 Literary Festival of the Peripheries and at the FLIP 2022 Paraty International Literary Festival.