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Watufani M. Poe, "Adé-Dúdú: The Creation of Brazil’s First Black Gay Organization”

Photo of Watufani M. Poe
Thursday, March 30, 2023
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Watufani M. Poe

Please join the From Slavery to Freedom Lab for Watufani M. Poe's upcoming talk "Adé-Dúdú: The Creation of Brazil's First Black Gay Organization," Thursday, March 30 at 12pm in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106. RSVP to cac174@duke.edu.

After ten long years of disenfranchisement and political repression during Brazil's military dictatorship, in the mid-1970s the country entered a period of slow re-democratization. This latter half of the decade gave way to the rise of vibrant movements of Black people, women, and LGBTQ+ communities pushing for political rights and representation. Adé-Dúdú, Brazil's first Black gay organization, sprouts out of this vibrant moment of social movement and identity politics in Brazil's northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia. This presentation presents the story of the creation of Adé-Dúdú in the late 1970s and early 1980s and shows how the organization's beginnings within Salvador's budding Black movement, and insistence upon pushing forth an intersection vision of freedom within the Black movement, proves how these activist fundamentally understood themselves as a Black gay movement, with particular emphasis on Black racial identity as a foundation.

Watufani M. Poe is an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD in Africana Studies from Brown University in May of 2021, his Masters in History and Africana Studies in 2018 from Brown, and his B.A. in Black Studies from Swarthmore College in 2013. Before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, he served as a Center for Humanistic Inquiry Postdoctoral Fellow at Amherst College from 2021-2022, placed in the Department of Black Studies and the Program in Latinx and Latin American Studies. His manuscript project, "Resisting Fragmentation: The Embodied Politics of Black Queer Worldmaking" is an ethnohistoric analysis of Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in Brazil and the United States to outline the ways Black LGBTQ people push for freedom across various social and political movement spaces.