Um olhar opositor sobre os memes macumbeiros: velhas e novas práticas de racismo religioso contra as comunidades tradicionais de terreiro na cultura digital

Abstract

This research investigates the discourses of axé influencers about Traditional Communities of Terreiro (CTTro) on the social media platform Instagram. Understanding religious racism (Rufino and Miranda, 2019) as a policy of violence that leverage narratives as one of its main tools of power, we will analyze the tensions and controversies within the discursive border zone (Sodré, 2023) of four macumba-themed. The research is based on a qualitative approach and its theoretical-methodological framework is based on a dialogue between the fields of Cultural Studies, Ethnic-Racial Relations and Digital Culture. The methodology adopted is the Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001). We hypothesize that the discourses, representations, and meanings mobilized in macumba memes have produced colonization of ancestral knowledge; cultural appropriation; historicale rasure; and the commercialization of blackspiritual practices. In this sense, we seek to analyze the influence of religious racism on new and old narratives of whitening, cultural, fetishization and folklorization of terreiro traditions, bearing in mind that new actors, costumes and complex colonial dynamics are at play in contemporary times. We assume that memes, through satire, metaphorical dynamics, semiotic effects and controlling images (Collins, 2019), undertake processes of ubiquitous learning (Santaella, 2013) and obscure practices of racial literacy (Twine and Steinbugler, 2006) about CTTro. Nevertheless, the narratives imposed on the signs of terreiro circulating in digital spaces — despite being violent in naming, controlling, and manipulating meanings and senses — are neither stable nor fixed; on the contrary, they remain provoking debatesas they also hold vulnerabilities that can disrupt traps or mere racist productions. Therefore, this research addressess the description of religious racism and, simultaneously, the discussion on the importance of an oppositional gaze (hooks, 2019) capable of unsettling and broadening the politics of signification against religious racism. In doing so, we also dispute memes as a narrative space-time that opens up crossroads (Martins, 1997) to destabilize racist representations of axé cults. We stress that the issue does not lie solely in the discursive realm but in the performance these narratives construct around the identity and knowledge of the terreiro, which sometimes contradicts the spiritual and religious code of the CTTro.