Descolonizando as emoções: um giro amefricano pelo discurso sobre as emoções nas bases do pensamento moderno

Abstract

This work critically explores the modern dichotomy between reason and emotion, evidencing how this separation operates as a power device in the construction of racial, epistemic, and existential hierarchies. It observes that rationality, elevated as the foundation of morality, science, and citizenship, was racialized, becoming a criterion for validating humanity, while affects, associated with instability and the body, were systematically relegated to irrationality and inferiority, thus underpinning racism. The dissertation uses Charles Mills's concept of the "racial contract" to unveil the exclusionary logic of the modern social pact, deepening it with Denise Ferreira da Silva's "engulfment strategy," which explains how the separation between reason and emotion subjugates non-white populations and contributes to colonialism. The study articulates these reflections with Brazilian Black thought, with an emphasis on Lélia Gonzalez's legacy, proposing the "Amefrican turn" as an epistemological movement that reconnects knowing and feeling to enable new practices. The research, anchored in a personal account of the demolition of Aldeia Imbuhy, in Niterói (RJ), demonstrates the politicization of rage and grief as forces of resistance and re-signification. It proposes a "disenchantment of rage" that rejects moral imperatives and reopens the sensible as a field of dispute and reinvention. The work, developed within a bioethics program in collective health, advocates for a bioethics sensitive to affects and plural experiences, capable of confronting historical asymmetries, recognizing racialized suffering, and promoting radical care. It concludes with an invitation to continue investigations into the coloniality of emotions and to listen to non-hegemonic epistemologies, aiming for a more equitable public health system and the construction of other ways of living, feeling, and caring