Vozes ancestrais sussurrando estratégias de sobrevivência: manipulação do arquivo e fabulação crítica no gesto autoral de Ana Maria Gonçalves

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes Ana Maria Gonçalves's novel Um Defeito de Cor (2006) to discuss the procedure of selecting, dismantling, and reassembling documents of different origins used by the author in its composition. This process, which I understand as a curatorial gesture (Azevedo, 2019; Obrist, 2010), is linked to the creation of fiction based on the gaps left by the violence of colonization. This procedure can be read as an exercise in critical fabulation (Hartman, 2020)—by giving voice and body to individuals and events forgotten in and by historical archives. For the discussion on the archive, I draw on Jacques Derrida (2001) and Arlette Farge (2022) and reconstruct a brief genealogy of the idea of fabulation, moving from Henri Bergson's philosophy (1978, 2004) to Saidiya Hartman (2020, 2022, 2024). During the research development, the work Os cânticos que encantaram Pierre Verger (2020), written by Angela Lühning and Silvanilton Encarnação da Mata, made it possible to connect a family history to an aspect of Salvador's collective history. At the end of the research, the boundaries between literature and history were found to narrow, as fiction is understood as a discourse offering a possibility for elaborating on what is lacunar in historiography.