This panel will discuss literature produced by Black Women in the diaspora and in Africa. The proposed works examine Black women’s protagonist in advancing a literary project grounded on feminist and decolonial practices. Presenters will focus on how Black feminist pedagogy is mobilized in African and Afro-Diasporic decolonial literature written by women, centering practices such as language preservation, memory-building and ancestral knowledge.
This session is a byproduct of the “New Approaches to Black Lusophone Studies” APSA/MLA co-sponsored session, which received a high number of exceptional proposals. The selected works align in their dynamic theoretical treatment of works written by Black women in the Global Portuguese world. They interrogate the limits of reading this body of work from a national literature perspective and affirm the various connections build across multiple representations of Black diasporic and African literature.
The session’s topic contributes to scholarship addressing the centrality of Afro-Brazilian movements for cultural recognition, citizenship and human rights in Global African Diaspora Studies, especially the movements led by Black Brazilian women. The proposed works the affirm a transnational approach to studies about Afro-Latin America and acknowledges the significance of cross-border exchanges especially around ideas and practices related to ancestral practices.
“(Im)material Transfigurations: Rhythm, Space, and Afro-Spiritual Experiences of Knowledge” proposes to relate Afro-Brazilian sociocultural concerns –often considered in isolation from broader Afro-Latin American studies– to Mayra Santos-Febres’ literate experiences of transgender mulatto spirituality and Rita Indiana’s political appeal to transfigurations in her literature and music.
“The Tragic Thread of Memory and Imprisonment in Ana Paula Maia” examines how Ana Paula Maia’s Assim na terra como embaixo da terra redresses Brazil’s colonial history and amplifies discourses dealing with disappearance and proposes a history of accountability for disappeared Indigenous and Blacks bodies. Maia’s work centers contemporary economic dispossession, imprisonment, and police brutality as a result of oppressive structures against new national imaginaries of the present.
“If I Didn't Define Myself for Myself...”: The Emancipation of Black Women in the Narratives of Emergence Ponciá Vicêncio and Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia” discusses Conceição Evaristo’s Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) and Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (2004). The work examines how the protagonists of the novels, Ponciá and Rami, become symbols of a contemporary Black feminist pedagogy as they respond to continuous and plural forms of exclusion undergone by Black women as part of societies that still rely on postcolonial tools of assimilation and subservience to preserve hegemonic marginalizing discourses.
“Language, Memory, Family, and Resistance in Eliana Alves Cruz’ Água de Barrela” examines the so-called “neo-slave narrative” Água de Barrela by Eliana Alves Cruz by focusing on how the acts of recollecting, remembering, and constructing families’ histories through time and space, as Cruz proposes, unveil some of the ways in which preservation of language, memory, and family bonds within the black community, while significantly altered by colonialism and slavery, remains as an emancipatory practice.
Presentations will be 12-15 minutes long, allowing 15 minutes for discussion.