Escravizados, mas não silenciados – um estudo sobre as narrativas de si de Mahommah Baquaqua e Juan Francisco Manzano

Abstract

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set stage for a series of discourses that attempt to define theoretical concepts, the human experiences and the human being as well. While Europe reaps the results of its successful imperialist enterprise, and the dissemination of the printed production, thousands of women, men and their descendants from different parts of the African continent cross the Atlantic and arrive in the cold New World as live commodities. Even though they were considered objects and were dispersed along marginalized spaces, their experiences also have changed the way the world had been read. It can be said that the African authors and their descendants have already been re-signifying their experiences and denouncing the epistemological violence or blindness, as Maria Lugones points out, in the Americas since then. Authors such as the Africans Olaudah Equiano and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Afro- Americans such as Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacob and the Afro-Cuban Juan Francisco Manzano, among others, have made their self-narratives an opportunity to re-read and record “experiências invisibilizadas, silenciadas ou construídas como um Outro da modernidade ocidental” (ADELMAN, 2007, p. 394). Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the self- narratives of Juan Francisco Manzano and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua and their complex experiences were represented by heterogeneous discourses, and many gaps - that scream. It interests me to analyse these discursive constructions and to investigate how African slavery in the Latin America, and the enslaved subjects were (self) represented and reallocated in these writings. But above all, this present work aims to contribute to the rescue and visibility of these voices as part of new genealogies of thought