Subalternity and silenced black women’s voices: an intersectional study in Ezilda Milanez Barreto

Abstract

The visibility of the contributions of black subjects to the culture of our country is a conquered territory, considering that the unofficial historical narrative, erected by those in power (men, whites, cisheterosexuals, Christians, without disabilities), sought to erase the contribution of Africans and Afro-descendants to Brazilian culture or, given the impossibility of such erasure, allocated it to places of subordination, as we can see in many of the representations of black characters that circulated, especially in Brazilian nineteenth-century prose. Therefore, from the perspective of Intersectionality, the present article aims to analyze the black female characters, contextualized within the Brazilian patriarchy and related to the decoloniality of race, in the fiction of the Paraíba writer Ezilda Milanez Barreto, more specifically in the novels E a luz brilhará nas trevas (1940), Nos arcanos do império (1981) e O meu mundo é assim (1983). To base our positions on the concept of subalternity and silenced black voices, we rely on Spivak (2014), Crenshaw (1989) and Akotirene (2019). We hope to contribute to intersectional studies in Afro-Brazilian literature by female authors and to reflection on recurrent issues in Brazilian society, such as structural racism, which emerge from the diegesis of the narratives that constitute our corpus of analysis.