Presentation for a Collective Effort-Malungo-Dossier

Abstract

This dossier presentes a discution about “other modes of the margin in Brazilian Literature and Culture” based on the concepts of malungaje, proposed by Jerome Branche, and brutalism, developed by Achille Mbembe. In the essay “Malungaje: towards a poetics of African Diaspora”, Branche expands the notion of malungo (a term of Bantu origin) into a concept that, from its etymology, will be thought of “as a kind of basic principle for the discursive imaginary of the diaspora”. In its “translocal registers and variations” and in its political dimensions, the concept includes “ideas of intersubjectivity, mutual reconigtion, and subaltern solidarity” (Branche, 2024). Originating from the African diaspora and the experience of slavery in the Americas, the term malungo spread in various forms throughout the country, becoming commonplace in Brazilian literature and culture from Manuel Bandeira’s Mafuá do malungo (1947) to Edimilson de Almeida Pereira Malungos na escola. Questões sobre culturas afrodescendentes e educação (2007). Regarding the concept of brutalism, Achille Mbembe appropriates it in architecture and the visual arts to consider it as an extension of his reflection on necropolitics and black reason. From this proposition emerge seven texts with diverse approaches to the other-same: six postgraduate students and one profesor from UFRJ address malungaje and brutalism from the perspective of Brazilian literature, with an emphasis on the production of racialized women writers and racial issues.