Costurando as palavras por entre trânsitos e raízes: modos de escrever o corpo negro na obra de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze the works Esse Cabelo (2015), Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), As Telefones (2020) and Maremoto (2021), by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, with the goal of investigating the ways of writing the Black and Afro-diasporic body in contemporary Portuguese literature. Born in the 1980s in Angola and raised in Portugal, Djaimilia highlights her Afro-descendant experience in her literary production. With this in mind, we are interested, in the first analysis, in reflecting on the colonial dynamics that reverberate in the post-independence period, both in the city of Lisbon, where much of the plot of these novels unfolds, and in the legal and social norms in place in Portugal. Therefore, in the selected narratives, we seek to highlight Black characters in the context of diaspora. We argue, in this sense, that their Afro-diasporic cartographies frictionize imaginaries about the city and reflect the complexities of Afro-descendant experiences, without failing to show the ambiguities that compose them. In this sense, it is relevant to debate to what extent the representation of sick, traumatized, exploited and servile bodies accounts for the persistence of a colonial mentality in their social, affective and labor relations. From this perspective, we intend to demonstrate that the fictionalization of these migratory flows makes diasporic stories of family separation visible, which leads us to think about the reasons and impacts of the lack of contact with their ancestral roots on the identity constitution of subjects in these conditions. Hence, we are interested in deepening the discussion about the monolithic and monocultural character of the notion of national identity, suggesting conceptual alternatives. Amid this, we propose to demonstrate the (in)communicabilities that permeate the narratives, detailing the contact strategies used by the characters. The debate on the black body in transit is central to this dissertation, and we therefore intend to relate current theoretical propositions on racism, immigration, Blackness, and diaspora in order to contribute to the deepening of the theme within the scope of studies of contemporary Portuguese literature. To understand the impacts of the maintenance of colonial pillars in post-colonial times, we propose Afro-transatlantic investigative links that are designed from the perspective of a dehierarchization of knowledge. Thus, we will use, especially, theoretical perspectives of Conceição Evaristo, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Grada Kilomba, Albert Memmi, Inocência Mata, Nuno Domingos, Elsa Peralta, and Donatella Di Cesare