Despite the persistence of political and economic violence perpetrated against the country’s most vulnerable populations, the vitality of the contributions made by Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian writers and artists in the last decade is notable and is reflected in the visible growth in the body of scholarship dedicated to the critical study of their work, adding to the contradictory sociopolitical and cultural context that characterizes contemporary Brazil. These developments are national and international in scope, and are also reflected on the institutional level: there has been a decisive transformation in the population of Brazil’s higher education institutions, where Black and Indigenous students are now visible on university campuses, but also at the curricular level, at a time when a longstanding but forgotten Afro-Brazilian literary tradition is being revived in undergraduate and graduate syllabi across the nation; furthermore, in the US we are witnessing curricular changes in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies graduate programs, some of which are now shifting their focus to the transdisciplinary study of the African diasporas, where Brazil occupies an indispensable space.

For this special session we have selected three papers from scholars in different stages of their careers who are currently working in US-based institutions, and who focus on sociopolitical and aesthetic issues pertaining to the work of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous authors.

Bruna Othero reads the work of the indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa as a palimpsest that transgresses the literary and artistic traditions of Brazilian culture. She sustains that, by bringing Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy and collage together, through the erasure and rewriting of national history, Baniwa builds his visual works, which can also be read as literary texts. Brushing history against the grain, as Benjamin suggests, Baniwa uses erasure and palimpsest to explain the narrative of violence experienced by indigenous people. According to Othero, Baniwa’s authorial gesture wants to rewrite history on top of what has already been written, bring new narratives above the “official” narrative. The version of the vanquished takes shape and form in his works, bringing the vision of those who were violated for centuries in the name of a supposed “civilization”. Eating, swallowing, and vomiting, Baniwa embodies the anthropophagic spirit while associating it with appropriation and collage. Therefore, his restoration of the official narrative is also an invention of new possible narratives, from new voices – as he himself attests: “every tradition is an invention”.

Jordan Jones reads Afro-Brazilian author Carlos Eduardo Pereira’s 2017 novel Enquanto os dentes as offering an atypical perspective on Rio de Janeiro. Readers accompany Antonio, a gay black man attempting to navigate city streets and public transportation in his wheelchair. As he makes the tortuous journey from his former apartment to the home of his estranged parents, readers witness a series of flashbacks revealing precarious working conditions, racial trauma, Antonio’s homophobic military father, romantic relationships, and the accident that paralyzed him from the waist down. These flashbacks rest on the framework of a defamiliarized view of Rio’s infrastructure, through which readers perceive the myriad ways the city is inhospitable to non-typical ways of being and behaving. Exploring intersectionality (Crenshaw) and the creative right to the city (Harvey, Beal) in the novel, Jones’ paper explores how race, sexual orientation, disability, relationships, and infrastructure overlap to condition Antonio’s experience of the city.

In “Apocalyptic Visions of the Present: Narratives of Black Youth and the Necropolitical State,” Eliseo Jacob posits that apocalyptic literature focuses on the imminent collapse of society, but always from a broader perspective. In contrast, contemporary literature produced by writers and artists from historically marginalized communities such as the peripheries and favelas of large cities in Brazil offer an apocalyptic vision of a destruction taking place now and not in a hypothetical near future for a specific demographic: urban Black youth. In his presentation, São Paulo writer Ferréz’s literary works will serve as the focus of analysis to understand how writers from peripheral communities offer an urgent message about the crisis of state violence against Black youth from economically and socially marginalized communities through dystopian plots. These literary works will be approached using the necropolitical theories of Achille Mbembe and Jaime Alves to understand how the current dystopian situation represented by Ferréz reflects how the state adopts a policy of displacement and extermination for a population seen as a threat and thus, experiences a dual denial of being: first as a citizen and second as a human being.