Banca de DEFESA: LILIAN DO CARMO DE OLIVEIRA CUNHA

The social place of a neguinha and the racial disobedience of the black woman: 

about speeches, displacements and writing…

racism, social place, black women, writing, racial disobedience.

In the same way that Neusa Santos Souza announced, I lived the process of becoming black. 

This discovery was made by the body-voice of Azoilda Loretto da Trindade, in 2011, 

when I was 22 years old. But only after completing my master's degree, having already 

started the doctoral process, did I understand that my black-woman-body, as Conceição 

Evaristo emphasizes, had been traversed by racism since childhood. Thus, what you will find 

in this writing, from writings, are the speeches that aim, directly or subjectively, to determine 

a social place of subservience to black women; seeking to understand in practical terms how 

the racial categories discussed in the academic context operate in our lives. However, it is 

also necessary to understand that the “steps that come from afar” reached us, causing 

displacement of these places defined by racism, which will be presented here as “racial disobedience”.

 In this sense, the present research aims to analyze not only the narratives that intend to define us, 

but the means by which we seek to write our own history, being we the protagonists of the choice of 

the place we must occupy, explaining that the personal trajectories of black women are political trajectories.

 With a view to achieving the objectives described here, I will present personal writings from different 

age groups, dialoguing with the writings of my mother and two companions from academia and life. 

And on the way to closing this text, I regrettably conclude that, however much we keep moving, 

disobeying, in the search to break the structures of racism, this does not retreat, because 

even occupying “other” places, it continues to label us. On the other hand, we continue and

 will continue to move against the grain of “a unique history”, so that we can make “a history 

written by black hands”. They will be with me in this xirê, in this circle or crossing: Márcia do 

Carmo, Maria Carolina, Neuza Maria, bell hooks, Conceição Evaristo, Lélia Gonzalez, Beatriz 

Nascimento, Nilma Lino Gomes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Grada Kilomba, Audre Lorde and 

many other black women who “dared” to theorize their writings.