WITNESSING GROUNDS: AFRO-DIASPORIC LITERATURE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRAZIL

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the question of what the quilombo means in Black imaginative work, with a focus on Brazil. I show how, in Brazil’s redemocratization period (roughly the 1980s and 1990s), the quilombo became an imaginative geography that Black intellectuals theorized as the space of transmission of resistant narratives, language, and culture, against manipulations of national historical memory in the service of whitening and the cultural engulfment of blackness. I call the quilombo, as a space of cultural transmission, the “witnessing ground,” focusing on ways in which it fosters modes of evidence, justice, and remembering that resist engulfment by national memorialization. Drawing on deconstructive approaches to developmental time-space that focus on culture’s layered and convoluted emergence through heritage and memory, I track how a set of Black authors across the twentieth-century theorize the quilombo as a space that traverses time against the grain of progress, highlighting “new” language and poetics as an echo of the ancestral that embodiment and ritual language and writing carry forward. I study how, through intertextual citation and reworking the tropes of earlier innovators of Black literary resistance, authors during redemocratization theorized and fictionalized an ancestral cultural heritage of Black writing and collective subjectivity. My research highlights unpublished literary archives as sites where the Black Brazilian literary past continues to unfold in and disrupt the progress-oriented Western arrangement of time and temporality that hierarchized peoples and contributed to the racial spatialization of globality since the Enlightenment. The quilombo, as a space of resistance, disrupts the individualized subject, which it enfolds into a collective that encompasses past generations.