Afro-Brazilian Spirituality and Black Placemaking in Contemporary Literature

• In Event: Mobilising memory in the present

Description for Program

This presentation discusses Afro-Brazilian religious knowledge systems as foundational elements in the production of Black Brazilian placemaking. I will discuss the representation of placemaking practices in texts by Black Brazilian women writers and exploring Afro-Brazilian spirituality as a source of strategies for crafting reparative imagined geographies. I argue that literature and culture are critical spaces that foreground placemaking and demonstrate that discursive practices have a bearing on race-based spatial practices. Afro-Brazilian religious knowledge systems are a foundational element of this space-based practice, as they provide operational principles that are central to the production of Black Brazilian territoriality.
In particular, I examine the novel O Crime do Cais do Valongo, by Eliana Alves Cruz though spatial analysis of the text that considers how the production of spatial agency in the narrative activates Black epistemology and practice. My interpretive model engages the concept of encruzilhada as an analytical tool to read spatial representations in the text and identify elements of placemaking that affirm the spatial lives of Afro-diasporic peoples. Codified by the figure of the Yoruba orixá Exú in Afro-Brazilian religious knowledge systems as the operational principle of possibilities, encruzilhada is an indispensable source for the creation of detours, passages, and fugitive routes, which are at the center of the production of Black territoriality in Brazil. Thus, my reading engages the codifications of Exú as the driving force that animates encruzilhada as a spatial praxis located in the diaspora.

Author

• Leonora Souza Paula, Michigan State University