Imagens da noite: ensaios sobre raça e racialização

Abstract

This text analyzes Images of the Night – Essays on Race and Racialization (2024), by Victor Galdino, highlighting his philosophical proposal to think of race as an imaginal form, distinct from the processes of racialization and racialized subjects. The work adopts an essayistic and experimental writing style, articulating epistemological, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, political, and historical perspectives to investigate how race operates as a management technology that dehumanizes and produces meanings. Throughout the text, Galdino critically engages with Fanon, Hartman, Rancière, Mbembe, and Afropessimism, questioning essentialist conceptions, the centrality of violence, and the melancholy linked to the archives of slavery. The author proposes shifting the focus from fixed identity to the multiplicity and becoming of racialized beings, defending a critical ontology oriented towards openness, imagination, and the abolition of race as a form. The reading emphasizes the coherence between form and content, as well as the tensions and limits of the proposal.