Assentamentos de resistência: escritoras e intelectuais negras no Brasil e Caribe em insurgências epistêmicas

Abstract

This text invests in the discussion about the of knowledge production (literature and criticism) by black women writers and intellectuals in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, he chose four female voices: Esmeralda Ribeiro and Conceição Evaristo (Brazil); Mayra Santos-Febres and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Puerto Rico). For the composition of the corpus, we selected critical essays and short stories published between 1982 and 2019. In an articulated way, the analysis of the works demonstrates the constitution of a black intellectual praxis or praxis of black intellectuals that is based on black African ancestry, on the stories and in the legacies of struggle and resistance of the ancestras. In addition to discussing the particularities of these narratives, in the double essayistic and literary dimension, we strive to make the concept of resistance settlements operational. At first, in the epistemic rituals, we used entry codes as a provocation to the notion of settlement: poetry/poems, novel scenes and various reflections. In a second moment, we invested in the settlements of the stories of our African and black ancestors to emphasize the legacies of resistance undertaken in the diaspora. Added to this, we emphasize how the resistance settlements give rise to knowledge and narratives silenced by dominant epistemologies. From other movements, followed by a creative and analytical interpretation of critical essays and short stories, we show how resistance settlements rise up against epistemicide and epistemic racism. In organizing the theoretical framework, we resorted to dialogue with a field that is characterized by the constitution of a broad critical and analytical repertoire produced from approaches based on black, African and decolonial epistemologies. Intertwining perspectives, we seek to speculate how resistance settlements are inscribed as a grammar in the production of knowledge by Latin American and Caribbean black women writers and intellectuals. Through this epistemic gesture resulting from black-African ancestry, we observe how black female literature and criticism, in ways of feeling, seeing, acting and thinking/theorizing: i) restore our humanity violated by colonial domination ; ii) reestablish the protagonism of our existences; iii) re-enchant the world.