Eric Santner, ‘Flesh”, Sovereignty, and Art: <em>The People’s Two Bodies</em> South of the Equator?

Abstract

This article analyzes two contemporary Brazilian artists – painter Rosana Paulino from São Paulo and writer Conceição Evaristo from Minas Gerais – whose works strongly reflect the difficult space occupied by black Brazilian women, in light of Eric Santner’s book The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. By means of clues left by the art produced in the period shaping modernity, Santner theorizes on the way in which post-monarchical societies confront the process of substituting monarchical sovereignty with popular sovereignty, established as they are in a context of scientistic reason, secularization, the eruption of capitalism, and the idea of the autonomy of subjects, and marked by the disciplinary power of biopolitics. Under the Eurocentric perspective (adopted by Santner) and based on the gaze of the Other, Rosana Paulino and Conceição Evaristo’s artistic production effectively reveals that the question of popular sovereignty and the space people occupy in it still lacks a decolonial shift, raising new gazes and reflections.