Quarto de despejo: escrevivências no diário antirracista de Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the work Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada (1960), by Carolina Maria de Jesus, from theoretical perspectives such as “escrevivência: a escrita de nós” (Evaristo, 2020a), criticism Afro-descendant literature, black feminism and other areas of this knowledge that can consistently support the carrying out of this work. Carolina's anti-racist narrative proves the trajectory of a writer aware of her ethnicracial origin, who movingly tells the overwhelming pain of being a black, poor, favela-dwelling woman in a country whose structural racism has the function of confining this subalternized population. in the social dungeon, like the unemployed, those living on hills, the homeless and those living in favelas in Brazil. The author tells her story, that of her three children and her community, whose population is majority black. The visceral strength of the narrator and protagonist is contributed to the writing of personal and collective experiences – lived and witnessed by herself – prerogatives peculiar to the tradition of telling or narrating of enslaved people, as well as countless contemporary black authors. This type of writing rejects the colonialist and racist thoughts and practices imposed by the hegemony of white, European values and the interests of the Brazilian economic elite. The episodes of Quarto de despejo take place in the former Favela do Canindé, an urban area of São Paulo, the capital, in the 1950s. This research is qualitative and of a bibliographic nature. The investigation will be carried out in light of the work of authors such as Cuti (2010); Conceição Evaristo (2020a, 2020b); Tom Farias (2018); Silvio Almeida (2021), Grada Kilomba (2019), Aimé Césaire (2020); Kabengele Munanga (2020); bell hooks (2019; 2020), Angela Davis (2016), Gayatri C. Spivak (2010) and Patricia Hill Collins (2019); between others.