"Retrieve Back"

A Contemplation on the Bird and the Adinkra Sankofa in Afro Brazilian Culture

Abstract

Observing Afro-Brazilian culture and, in the face of media processes at the time, the article proposes the Adinkra Sankofa and its circulation in Brazil as an object of study. Adinkra is a set of images of the Akan people of Ghana and one of them is Sankofa. The design of a bird with its head back conveys the message that sometimes we need to go back to the past to recover what was lost in order to build the future. Sankofa has been an increasingly recurrent image in Afro-Brazilian culture, and in order to understand its roots and dynamics, the research retrieves the image from the observations of W. Bruce Willis in the Adinkra Dictionary and investigates the circulation of the Adinkra Sankofa under the theoretical framework that includes Vilém Flusser, Norval Baitello and Aby Warburg. The research is justified by its contribution towards the rescue and strengthening of African culture and the Adinkra in Brazil, as well as to the communicational approach of a proposal of the science of culture.