Cartas do passado, fabulações do presente: a escrita epistolar em Mukanda Tiodora na construção de práticas antirracistas no ensino de história

Abstract

Mukanda Tiodora (2022), by Marcelo D’Salete, transforms into a graphic narrative the letters that Teodora Dias da Cunha, an enslaved African woman in the province of São Paulo during the 19th century, dictated to another enslaved Black man. Illiterate, she made the spoken word and mediated writing an act of resistance. Mukanda Tiodora does not merely illustrate the past: it recreates it, operating within the interstices of the archive. Through a visual language marked by ellipses, silences, and framing, the graphic novel addresses gaps, reinscribes historically marginalized subjects as protagonists of their own trajectories, and calls upon the reader, especially the student, to occupy an active position in relation to fragments of history. The research, using a qualitative approach, is based on bibliographic and documentary analysis. Their findings indicate that the work can contribute to anti-racist practices in history education by shifting the reader's focus away from stereotypical versions of Black lives and inviting them to inhabit the silences of the archive and to ask, in the face of each document, what has been left out. The study also addresses the limitations of the educational system; Laws No. 10.639/2003, 11.645/2008, and 14.986/2024 open important loopholes, but schools often lack the structure and time to implement them, and still prioritize memorization over the critical experience of reading. In the end, Mukanda Tiodora is not just a work to be analyzed; it is an invitation to listen to what the archive has tried to silence.