The banishment of being

Exile, resistance and decoloniality in contemporary brazilian narrative

Abstract

The Brazilian literary narrative has presented, especially in the last three decades, discourses that dialogue with notions of the wide movement of Latin American decolonial epistemologies, mainly in regard to the (re/de)construction of aesthetics oriented by the European cultural hegemony and the subversion of the notion of experience conceived by Modernity. These assumptions guide the present study, which is dedicated to the reading of the novels Becos da Memória (2006), by Conceição Evaristo, and Com armas sonolentas (2018), by Carola Saavedra. From the perspective of the protagonists, women who enunciate themselves from the borderline subjectivities and are composed by the experience and local knowledge, emanate from these narratives voices that, impregnated by the experience of violence and exile, thus understood according to the resignifications of Said (2003), reinvent their own identities based on the notion of collectivity, thus confronting the hegemonic and centralizing structures of globalizing policies. In addition to being severe criticisms of the exclusionary rhetoric of Modernity, when they problematize the I/other relationship and the place of speech reserved for the white man, these novels evoke the origins and ancestry, questioning the chain of processes that establishes the places of cultural power and their forged hierarchies.