ERASED VOICES, REEXISTING MEMORIES: AFRO-DESCENDANT LITERATURE IN THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAS
Afro-descendant literature across the continent goes beyond strictly aesthetic value, constituting itself as a living archive of resistance, memory, and re-existence. This production evokes the concept of “escrevivência” (“writing-living”), coined by Conceição Evaristo, in which writing emerges from the historically marked experience of Black subjects, configuring an act that is at once aesthetic and political, one of subjective and collective inscription that erases colonial erasure. From the perspective of the sociology of literature, such works are understood within the dialectic between aesthetic form and social process, following Antonio Candido, for whom the social element does not constitute mere content, but a factor that becomes internalized in the structure of the work and becomes properly literary. Within this horizon, the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin offers a decisive key for literary criticism: the word is taken as an ideological sign and a common territory of voices in tension, such that Afro-diasporic prose and the novel reveal themselves as spaces of dialogism, polyphony, and heteroglossia, in which competing social voices resonate. To this reading are added the contributions of Lucien Goldmann, Georg Lukács, and Pierre Bourdieu, which make it possible to situate the literary work within the worldviews, social relations, and field of symbolic production in which it is generated and legitimized. In dialogue with this line of thought, cultural studies broaden the scope of analysis by conceiving culture as social practice and a terrain of dispute over meanings and identities. Following Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, literature is taken as a signifying practice traversed by relations of power, race, and representation, capable of questioning naturalized identities and affirming historically subalternized forms of belonging. Paul Gilroy’s reflection on the Black Atlantic further offers a transnational framework for thinking about the circulation of Afro-diasporic memories, forms, and knowledge beyond national borders, in keeping with the continental character of the Congress. This articulation finds an echo in the decolonial studies of Aníbal Quijano and in the concept of the “coloniality of power,” which denounces how racial hierarchization survives the end of formal colonialism and continues to operate in educational institutions through epistemic Eurocentrism. Bringing Afro-descendant literature to the center of educational debate aligns with bell hooks’s proposals for an engaged and transgressive pedagogy, capable of turning the classroom into a space of freedom. The aim, then, is to demonstrate how reflections grounded in the sociology of literature and cultural studies can support genuinely anti-racist pedagogical practices, the formulation of inclusive curricular policies, and the training of teachers sensitive to ethnic-racial diversity. In this way, the academic community is invited to submit oral presentations investigating Afro-American literary works from these critical frameworks, addressing topics such as the relationship between literary form and social processes, memory, identity and representation, diaspora and belonging, as well as pedagogical practices, teaching materials, and education on ethnic-racial relations. Studies problematizing the processes of canonization, forgetting, and archiving of these voices in schools and universities will be equally welcome, fostering intercultural and transnational dialogue among researchers in the fight against structural racism in the Americas.
