MACABÉA: FLOR DE MULUNGU: ANCESTRALITY AND RESISTANCE OF THE BLACK WOMAN IN CONTEMPORARY AFRO-BRAZILIAN LITERATURE
Afro-Brazilian literature; Ancestry; Black feminism
The short story Macabéa: Flor de Mulungu (2023), by Conceição Evaristo, resulted from an invitation by Editora Oficina Raquel for contemporary writers to engage in dialogue with The Hour of the Star (A Hora da Estrela, Lispector, 1977), by Clarice Lispector. By revisiting the character Macabéa, Evaristo offers a critical rereading that reinscribes her within the field of contemporary Afro-Brazilian literature, shifting her from a position of invisibility and silencing to one of resistance, memory, and ancestry. In this sense, the character ceases to be merely a narrative object and assumes the status of a historical, political, and epistemological subject, confronting the Eurocentric literary canon directly. The research problem consisted in understanding how Conceição Evaristo resignifies the character Macabéa, transforming her into a symbol of re-existence and the affirmation of Afro-Brazilian identity in the face of the erasure and epistemicide historically imposed on Black women. The general objective of the study was to analyze representations of Black women in the short story, observing how Evaristo’s writing subverts hegemonic discourses through lyricism, ancestry, and plural Brazilian identity. As specific objectives, the study sought to investigate the articulation between memory, identity, and resistance, as well as to engage with key concepts from Black feminism and decolonial criticism. The research adopted a qualitative, bibliographic, and analytical approach, grounded in the concepts of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2002), subalternity (Spivak, 2010), and epistemicide (Carneiro, 2005). The methodology involved a close reading of the short story, a critical review of the theoretical literature, and a literary analysis guided by thematic axes: ancestry, memory, identity, and plural Brazilianness. The results indicate that Evaristo resignifies Macabéa as a character who is both singular and multiple, a guardian of collective knowledge and a synthesis of Indigenous, Black, and Portuguese matrices, thereby reaffirming Afro-Brazilian literature as a space of political resistance, the valorization of memory, and the construction of a decolonial perspective.