Everyone’s Love, Seed-Words to Change the World: Grammars of Resistance by Cultural Collectives from the Brazilian Racialised Periphery in Times of Health Crisis

Abstract

This article focuses on the production of a cultural grammar of resistance from the analysis of linguistic-political practices of youth cultural collectives in the racialised periphery of Fortaleza, Ceará, experienced in the cartographies of Viva a Palavra, a popular education program committed to confrontation of violence through the valorization of racialised and feminised subaltern ways of life and self-organized practices of art and culture. Words-world were generated, in cartographic participatory and prefigurative research. Such words and the generative themes that resulted from the participatory-pedagogical methodology of the project itself allowed the analysis of language games, such as culture circles which, although some were created remotely due to Covid 19, function as resistance linguistic practices, in the face of social suffering, aggravated by the Covid 19 pandemic. In this study, Paulo Freire's concepts of word-world were articulated with Wittgenstein's concepts of language games and language therapy (in a collective liberatory sense). Also central are Veena Das' works on social suffering and cultural grammar. The collective analysis embodies the effects of violence on the socialities of youth peripheral racialised groups and the linguistic practices (which are also material and ontological-epistemological) of resistance to violence.

Yes, We Speak, Si Tenemos Voz: On Refusing Epistemological Terra-Nullius

“…We are held by the foremothers and ancestors of such lineages such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Chicana Feminisms (Keating/Anzaldúa, 2015), Audre Lorde (Lorde, 1984) and Black feminisms (Cruz, 2001;Hartman, 2008), and Vivir a Palavra and heritages of popular education of Paulo Freire (2000). Claudiana Alencar (2023), Zuleika Shrek (2023) and here Sara C Motta in this introduction call to presence otherwise through the poem, and the figure of the racialised and feminised poet/storyteller, always in relation never standing on their own or speaking in a solipsistic individualising voice other stories to be told and co-emergent voice-language-speech as worldmaking praxis.…”

“…As Claudiana Alencar (2023) in her piece "Everyone's love, seed-words to change the world: grammars of resistance by cultural collectives from the Brazilian racialized periphery' discusses from her activist-scholar work with Vivir a Palavra cultural collective that are from and work in the racialised peripheries of Fortaleza, they co-weave a cultural grammar of resistance. Such a cultural grammar of resistances is a cry of refusal against the racialised extermination of afro-Brazilian youth of the peripheries.…”

“…Such a cultural grammar of resistances is a cry of refusal against the racialised extermination of afro-Brazilian youth of the peripheries. Alencar (t)races seed-words which are threads of beingknowing that articulate the desire for life and the onto-epistemological proximities in which language is a form of life or life making (Alencar, 2021a;2021b). Seed-words are loaded (not as heaviness but as freedom) as signs/sites of pain, struggle and dignity.…”

“…Instead, they beckon and guide towards a descent into the territories of County/Land and body/ the enfleshed as the site of the dark wisdoms of which Patricia Hill Collins (1990) talks (see also Keating/Anzaldúa, 2015;Motta, 2018). Our authors undertake such descent and re-emergence through praxis such as decolonising autoethnography (Barthwal-Datta), decolonising to refuse epistemic imperialism of both mainstream social science (Biswass) and liberal White feminism's refusal to see that yes we as brown, black and Indigenous women can indeed and have always spoken (Pandey, 2023) border-crossing pedagogy (Oliveira, Finardi, and Basilio, in this issue), cartographies and word-seeds of participatory action research (Alencar, 2023), and liminagraphy methodology (Shrek, 2023).…”