XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Escrevivência as a Theory of Diasporic Cultural Inheritance

• In Event: Ancestralidade: Black Study in Brazil

Abstract

My talk focuses on a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer, Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. I argue that Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017a)—semi-autobiographical remembrances of a mid-century favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought due to the temporal frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. Escrevivência
reveals the not-yet-said as something that has already been articulated, ruminated on and retold by generations that reproduce themselves precisely in this resistant retelling. Becos is the first instance of Evaristo’s literary escrevivência, written in the eighties, prior to Evaristo’s coining of the term in 1995. So I note how within the paradoxical temporal structure of escrevivência,
Becos, as the first instance, bears witness to being preceded by a range of verbal and written expressions, each with their own claim to diasporic anteriority and priority, to firstness. As such, I study the temporal recursivity that escrevivência produces in three approaches to Becos: First, I consider Becos in terms of the literary anteriority Evaristo has asserted for herself, focusing on
the work of Carolina Maria de Jesus, the first writer from the perspective of the resident of the favela; second, I examine the narration of silence in Becos as the attempt to give language to the chaos and desire that precede language; finally, I analyze how Becos dramatizes the inheritance of Black anteriority, with certain characters instantiating an economy of diasporic language and
temporality that Evaristo acknowledges as a gift she has received and which her book confers. This talk is thus concerned with escrevivência as the problem of naming a Black collective
subject’s articulation in anteriority.

Author

• William Mullaney, Princeton University