Pequenas Mahins: culturas infantis das meninas negras na Escola Comunitária Luiza Mahin em Salvador, Bahia

Abstract

The writing of this thesis is based on the affirmation that young black girls are announcers of other worlds, which is, they are messengers of black ancestry, and they bring continuity. These girls are not old, they are not young, and they are not future. These girls are in the present, in here and now. They go! They follow in inventions, fissure, insurgencies and disobediences. Following the route created by black girls that I found in this thesis construction, I aimed understand how child’s culture are produced in everyday experiences lived by young black girls that attend the Comunitária Luiza Mahin School, in Salvador, Bahia. Through this aim, I produced an ethnography with an eight- girl- group composed by girls that were 5 years old in a kid’s garden classroom on Comunitária Luiza Mahin School in 2021, year that we faced the pandemics occasioned by Coronavirus. In order to find myself and research with young black girls, I brought Childhood Sociology Studies dialoguing with Decolonial studies in an attempt to dewhiten Childhood Sociology. Besides these two theoretical fields, this work also anchors itself in ethnic-racial, gender and childhood’s social studies. The context that these black girls live in their childhood, as far the territory as the school was presented as a way of demonstrate that child’s culture do not exist in the social empty and, as consequence forms and is formed by it. This thesis points to the girls that participated in the research build cultures between pairs and between women and men marked by racial, gender and generation issues, prominently to crossing between childhood’s culture and diasporic black culture highlighting Hapiness/Alacrity concepts’ (Muniz Sodré, 2006) and Odara (Marco Luz, 2018). In addition to this appointment discussions about bodies and black childhood gain emphasis in the work demonstrated by young black girls that use them to express their wishes, feelings and produce culture. This research announces the importance of embodiment in the process, through which the black girls participate in the social life. Young black girls bodies’ were understood in this work as biological, historic, cultural and social, but also localized in a black majority territory, this is how it is constituted body-territory-child.