"Cuscunga Black Woman" and "Black Man" in Quotidian Literature

• In Event: Black Lives Matter, ¡Todas! Fugitive Formations in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper considers the anti-Black lessons embedded in rhymes and "traditional" games taught in schools in Ecuador, and how they cross into the most private spaces, memories and family, as well as to community and society. The text draws attention to what Mónica Moreno (2010) calls racist logics, analyzing how these logics in Latin American societies generate anxieties, characters, messages and (hi)stories that are kept within what I propose here as everyday literature. The text also engages with Zakiyyah Jackson's (2020) notion of plasticity to understand how everyday literature and its discourses engrain anti-Black configurations within society.
I propose to understand everyday literature as a moving body of created stories whose cadence implies orality and also, as in games, actions woven into phrases and deliberate displacements that are recognized and repeated in the day to day. Thus, it is possible to analyze the set of discourses that these stories present as something "traditional," whether a "traditional" rhyme or a "traditional" game, and that are considered in this way because they become part of that dance of stories that has been repeated for generations and speaks of qualities of the everyday within a society. The everyday is simultaneously the space where those stories are repeated and the ones they (re)create.
Textualized stories offered in classrooms and playgrounds in schools produce history and give meaning to everyday life. As suggested by the Afro-Brazilian thinkers Conceição Evaristo (2020), Millen Silva and Elena Batista (2020), every expression narrated, spoken, declaimed, has the power to create realities and to lighten the weight imposed by the harshness of the anti-Black configurations that feed pains and mournings of children and families.
The proposition that this paper makes is that everyday literatures embraced in school and curriculum communicate lessons about the world and recreate it. Therefore, they have the power to participate either in the continuation or in the disruption of racist logics and anti-Black configurations within societies. There is thus an important responsibility to transform the future by stopping the literatures that kill and echoing those that give life.

References:
Evaristo, Conceição. 2020. “Escrevivências.” Leituras Brasileiras. Entrevista publicada en YouTube https://youtu.be/QXopKuvxevY, 5 de Febrero.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. “Losing Manhood Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative”. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press: ProQuest Ebook Central.
Moreno Figueroa, Mónica. 2010. “Distributed intensities: Whiteness, mestizaje and the logics of Mexican racism.” Ethnicities. 10(3):387-401.
Silva, Millen C & Batista, Elena M. 2020. “Poeta-Opositor: estratégias de enfrentamento nas experiências de racismo cotidiano.” Revista Psicologia, Diversidade e Saúde, 9(2): 190-198.

Author

• Gioconda Pamela Coello, University of Wisconsin - Madison