Bruno R. Véras | Assumano Mina do Brasil: Islam, Samba, Healing and the Making of an Image

Professor Véras's workshop lecture will examine the life and historical significance of the Alufá Assumano Mina do Brasil, a Brazilian-born Black Muslim leader active in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including trial records, newspapers, photographs, and musical references, it situates Assumano within the social and cultural worlds of post-Abolition Brazil. In doing so, the talk highlights the entanglement of Islam, Black religiosity, healing practices, urban sociability and the creative musical milieu associated with the Pequena África, in Rio de Janeiro. This research places the Alufá within broader networks of Afro-Brazilian religious life and Black intellectual and cultural history. It argues that his trajectory illuminates the complexity of Black Muslim presence in Republican Brazil, as well as the ways police surveillance, criminal proceedings and the press produced fragmentary yet revealing archives of that presence, including iconography. At the core of this lecture is the discovery of Assumano’s personal photograph in historical newspapers. 

The talk considers the meanings of finding the image of a Black Muslim leader in such a setting and how this visual trace changes the questions we ask of the archive itself. Rather than serving merely as an illustration, the photograph becomes a historical problem and a methodological invitation to think more carefully about image-making, memory and the representation of Black Muslim subjects in media-making.