Discursos de morte na literatura: da (des)construção do não-humano através da linguagem

Abstract

In the following lines, I aim to point out the interweaving and overlapping of theory, literature, and reality, drawing a division between discourses of death and the possibilities of deviating from such discourse. Throughout this work, we will discuss the idea of the death of the black subject – be it fictional, social, epistemological, or literal. Our starting point is the issue of the dehumanization of black bodies through racism and the concept of whiteness, and to this end, we use as guiding texts Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson and the short story The Comet by W.E.B. Du Bois; in addition to these two works, we will include names such as Sueli Carneiro, Orlando Patterson, Judith Butler, Cida Bento, Joseph Conrad, with his book Heart of Darkness, and also the novel Native Son by Richard Wright and Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, which, in the second chapter of this work, will be part of the discussion about the discourse of death and its faces. We intend, therefore, to analyze the possibilities of language and literature acting in favor of bodies read as non-human, dissident, outside the standards imposed by the dominant classes and, consequently, non-canonical