Breathing Out of Line(s): Approaches to Black Women's Literary Scenes in Germany and Brazil
Keywords: Black German Literatura, Black Brazilian Literature, Performance, Black Transnationalism, Contemporary Arts.
This project is born out of both the positive reception among students and researchers of Germanistics and Brazilian Black artists of themes I discussed in my Master’s Thesis on May Ayim’s poetry and of my translations of works by the artist Grada Kilomba. The objective of this dissertation is to discuss the Black literary cene in Germany and Brazil and its hypothesis is that it is through cultural procedures that an afrodiasporic epistemology reveals itself, opening portals of dialogues between very different parts of the diaspora. Methodologically, Black artistic productions (poetry, music and performance) from both countries produced between the 1980s and 2020 will be selected and brought together under a Black transnational feminist perspective, articulating aesthetic, historical, political and social intersections. The research aims to present to the Brazilian audience an updated overview of Black artists in the Germanophone cultural setting, pinpointing and enabling dialogues between the contemporary Black German and Black Brazilian Arts. Considering the decolonial turn in Human Sciences globally, the importance of studies on Black history, daily life, discourses and arts in different contexts is increasingly urgent and fruitful, for they breath new life into these discipline and reinforce our anticolonial and transnational struggles for freedom.