“In the Shade of Precarious Limbs: Risia’s Muddy Entanglements in Marilene Felinto’s As Mulheres de Tijicopapu”

• In Event: Resistencia en la Palabra Escrita: Escritoras Indígenas y Afrodecendientes Contemporáneas. II

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the complex entanglements between race, gender and class that redefine the “precarious life” of Rísia, an Afro-Brazilian Mestiça, within the “relational framework” of diaspora. This paper moves through memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies and diasporic studies as I examine Risia’s practices of belonging throughout her “walking” journey from Sao Paulo to Tijucopapo, “where the beach meets the mud.”
With a particular focus on race, I examine the shades of belonging as Rísia’s body oscillates between a dynamic of exclusion on the national sphere and inclusion on the diasporic sphere. I argue that such a precarious positionality read in conjunction with what Martinican thinker Edouard Glissant calls “La Relation,” reformulates the routes/roots of Rísia’s diasporic subjectivity from her decision to leave Sao Paulo to her involvement with Lampião, the Brazilian folk hero.
In doing so, I engage with new articulations of diasporic identities negotiating indigeinity and blackness in Brazil from a postcolonial perspective and I dialogue with postcolonial scholars Ella Shohat and Shu-Mei Shih in what they coined “the relational framework.” Consequently, my paper resituates Felinto’s As Mulheres de Tijucopapo (1983) within the global relational networks of world literature.

Author

• Hapsatou Wane, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign