Memórias do colonialismo: traumas ibero-amefricanos na literatura testemunhal de Conceição Evaristo, Isabela Figueiredo e Grada Kilomba

Abstract

This dissertation examines the testimonial literature of Conceição Evaristo, Isabela Figueiredo, and Grada Kilomba as a language for the public working-through of colonial trauma within the space of the former Portuguese Empire. The research understands the colonial past as an open wound that is constantly reenacted across different regimes of barbarism: the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, the Portuguese Estado Novo in Mozambique, and everyday racism in contemporary Europe. The theoretical-methodological framework articulates classical trauma and testimony studies with postcolonial and decolonial critiques. In doing so, the investigation problematizes the Eurocentrism of canonical trauma studies and proposes a decolonization of this field by listening to experiences silenced by Iberian colonialism. To name this historical and traumatic circuit connecting the Iberian Peninsula, the Americas, and Africa, the work introduces the concept of Ibero-Amefrica, which incorporates the specificities of Iberian racism, from the statutes of blood purity to Luso-tropicalism and the denial of racism as continuous structures in the present of these societies. The analysis of Becos da memória reveals how Evaristo, through her practice of escrevivência [writing-living], connects the forced removal of the Pindura Saia favela to slavery and dictatorial violence, exposing the continuity of the colonial logic that relegates Black populations to spaces of exclusion, denouncing that the “senzala-favela” [slave-quarters-favela] persists as a remnant of the slaveholding past and that hygienist policies reenact the discrimination that has structured Brazilian society since colonization. In Caderno de memórias coloniais, Figueiredo, from the position of whiteness, betrays her colonialist father by denouncing sexual and labor exploitation in Mozambique, breaking with the complicit silence of Luso-tropicalism and highlighting the features of a system founded on violence against Black women, humiliation of Black men, and spoliation of African labor, emphasizing that coloniality has shaped Portuguese identity itself and impacts the metropole’s refusal to confront its past. In Memórias da plantação: episódios de racismo cotidiano, Kilomba investigates racial discrimination in Europe as a reenactment of colonial domination, decolonizing subjectivity through the affirmation of a diasporic and borderland voice that refuses the positions imposed by whiteness, showing how the colonial past erupts in the present through gestures, gazes, and words that fix the Black subject in positions of subalternity, exoticism, and suspicion, daily reenacting the logic of the plantation. The three authors, through situated and partial languages, grounded in escrevivência, betrayal, and academic research, bear witness to trauma, unarchive colonial memories, and critically fabulate to engage with the past ethically in the present of writing, expanding the historiographical and literary horizons on testimony and colonial trauma, as well as converge in denouncing the violent effects of coloniality upon Ibero-Amefrican subjects. By confronting official memory and hegemonic discourses that sustain the myth of racial democracy and harmonious colonization, the three writers reclaim the possibility of testifying, destabilizing the epistemological foundations that perpetuate silence about colonial barbarism and asserting that the working-through of trauma demands public discussion of this pain as a condition for its ethical repair. Thus, this testimonial literature, by inscribing in language what power sought to silence, constitutes an act of epistemic disobedience that brushes history against the grain, contributing to the collective working-through of colonial traumas and the decolonization of memory and knowledge throughout Ibero-Amefrica.