Faith and black festivals in Africas-Brazils: the conceptualization of Orixality

Abstract

This article examines Orixality as an aesthetic-epistemological category emerging from Afro-diasporic religiosities in Brazil, articulating faith, celebration, and knowledge production across terreiros, streets, and popular cultural practices. The research problem addresses how ritual experiences in Candomblé and Umbanda, together with festive manifestations such as carnival, samba, and urban performances, generate situated forms of thought, memory, and resistance to colonial epistemologies. The objective is to outline the conceptual contours of Orixality through the category Africas-Brazils, understood as a historical geography shaped by African and Indigenous ancestries and diasporic negotiations. Methodologically, the study combines theoretical reflection, analysis of artistic “event-objects,” and situated observation of religious and cultural practices. The analysis shows that faith and festivity function as cosmopolitical devices for transmitting knowledge, organizing communities, and reinventing identities. The main findings argue that Orixality constitutes a plural ethical-aesthetic field in which religiosity, orality, corporeality, and artistic creation intersect, producing collective pedagogies and counter-colonial strategies. The article concludes that Black and Afro-Indigenous festivities are not merely expressions of devotion but living territories of knowledge, essential for understanding contemporary Black culture and politics of existence in Brazil.