(RE)EXISTIR, SUBVERTER E (DES)CONSTRUIR: A literatura afro-diaspórica como dispositivo de Formação Cultural Contextual e resistência

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation, developed within the Research Group Formação e Cultura na Sociedade Contemporânea (EduForP/UFMS–CNPq), investigates Afro-diasporic literature as a field of formation, memory, and (re)existence. Grounded in Critical Theory and Decolonial Thought, it revisits the notion of Bildung (Adorno 1995; Horkheimer 1944; Marcuse 1973), understood as a Eurocentric formative ideal that, under the logic of instrumental reason, universalized a particular model of subject while producing racial, epistemic, and ontological exclusions. In response, the research proposes the concept of Cultural Contextual Formation (Formação Cultural Contextual – FCC), defined as an ethical, aesthetic, and political process of reconstructing humanity in contexts marked by colonial trauma and systemic racism. The FCC is structured upon the interrelation between body, ancestry, orality, and insurgent memory, promoting a form of learning based not on assimilation but on rootedness and critical listening. Drawing from thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (1952/2008), Lélia Gonzalez (1988), bell hooks (1994), Stuart Hall (1997), Catherine Walsh (2009), Achille Mbembe (2017), and Walter Mignolo (2003), this dissertation articulates a decolonial epistemological shift that conceives formation as an act of rehumanization and re-existence. Within this horizon, the study develops the Diasporic Psychic Dialectics (D.P.D.), a methodological approach that interweaves the psychic, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the Black experience. Inspired by Freud (1915; 1923), Fanon (1952/2008), and Kilomba (2008), the D.P.D. operates as a practice of listening and interpretation oriented toward symbolic elaboration of trauma and restitution of diasporic subjectivity. The work Plantation Memories (Kilomba 2008) occupies a methodological place of emergence in this construction, providing the epistemological ground for such practice of listening. The literary analyses focus on Beloved (Morrison 1987) and Torto Arado (Vieira Junior 2019), which, in different historical and aesthetic contexts, elaborate the pain and resistance of Black bodies, transforming literature into a territory of formation and symbolic healing. These narratives reveal that Afro-diasporic writing not only denounces the violences of modernity but also produces epistemologies rooted in ancestry and the circularity of time.The dissertation concludes that Cultural Contextual Formation, articulated with the methodological listening of the Diasporic Psychic Dialectics, offers the field of Education a new formative grammar: situated, insurgent, and reparative. By recognizing literature as a locus of thought, memory, and transformation, this study reaffirms the power of the word as a technology of rehumanization and a political practice of (re)existence.