Úrsula, Pedaços da Fome e Becos da Memória: romances de autoria feminina na literatura negro-brasileira

Abstract

As regards the aesthetic output of Black female authors, the novel genre reflects and refracts the world of life in the architectonics of literary creation. In dialogue with it, the world of art integrates the ideological and axiological relationships that occur between the provisions of language (as a system and otherwise) through authorial compositions of artistic discourse. Prosaic arrangements are inserted into the scene through content, material, and form to create chronotopes and characters that highlight insurgent narratives. Tradition and hegemonic norms are, thus, confronted through the break of instituted silence and the representation of Black women’s daily experiences of existence and resistance. In this vein, we aim to understand, in light of the dialogic theory of novelistic discourse, how the author-creator reveals herself in the socio-aesthetic architectonics of novels written by Black women in Black-Brazilian literature. To this end, we use the writings of the Bakhtin Circle - Bakhtin (2015, 2018, 2023), Volóchinov (2021) - in line with the studies on Black female authors and Black feminism theories, from a decolonial perspective, based on the discussions undertaken by Gonzalez (2020), Ribeiro (2018, 2019, 2020), Miranda (2019), among other intellectuals. With this aim, we use dialogical correlation as a methodological proposal to analyze the literary text based on the reading of the novels titled Úrsula, by Maria Firmina dos Reis (1859), Pedaços da Fome (1963), by Carolina Maria de Jesus, and Becos da Memória (2003), by Conceição Evaristo. The research carried out highlights the dialogue between the three novels based on their authorial position regarding the aesthetic disposition of the Black-author-creators, who articulate aesthetic elements, such as chronotopes and characters, in order to underscore spaces of resistance and oppression, confront social structures, and evince Black characters’ voices and memories. Therefore, novels by Black female authors challenge the tradition of colonial and patriarchal discourses, counteracting literary tradition. Thus, by exploring the constitution of the aesthetic object through the dialogical relations of language in Black female authors’ output, we hope to contribute to literary, feminist and decolonial studies.