Legacies of coloniality and racialization: Comparative Perspectives in Europe

• Autor(a) principal: Sousa, Sandra
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://revistadeletras.utad.pt/index.php/revistadeletras/article/view/344

This study looks at two fiction writers—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida—from two apparently distinct geographies, in order to argue for epistemological connections across African diasporic communities from different geographies. I will be reading, in particular, the issue of race and phenotype features portrayed in two of their books, That Hair (2015; published in translations by Tin House in 2020) and Americanah (2013), in order to establish concerns raised by both writers which, one can argue, reflect the living communities from which they come and into which they circulate. Born in two different Western African countries, Nigeria and Angola respectively, both Almeida and Adichie are descendants of two distinct post-independence universes—one Anglophone, the other Lusophone—but, at the same time, similar. It is then my hypothesis that the Portuguese African diaspora shares more than diverges from other African diasporas elsewhere, being tied by epistemological and corporal aesthetic forms of resistance to ongoing forms of coloniality and racialization. In order to delve in the fictional world of both writers and understand their legacy of coloniality, I will use the concepts of Afropeans and Afropolitans developed by Johny Pitts, Achille Mbembe and Taiye Selasi, amongst others.