Deslocamentos identitários nas narrativas Mulheres de Cinzas e Americanah

Abstract

This dissertation approaches the identity displacements in the narratives Mulheres de Cinzas (2015) by the Mozambican author Mia Couto and Americanah (2014) by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Those post-colonial African literary works are analyzed by the comparative studies bias and aim to reflect about the subject and, specially, the female subject starting at the approach of subalternity, otherness and resistance. To analyze literary works such as Mulheres de Cinzas and Americanah, which inquiry and subvert hegemonic discourses, justify itself for being a point to access knowledge and change of mentality, contributing to end the danger of a single story, as Chimamanda Adichie stated. The reading of Adichie and Couto provides the access to the discourse of resistance and recognition of cultural differences and plural identity processes, because it enables the reader to be in touch with confrontations capable of producing identitary and cultural displacements through the most critical reading of the literary text, as proposed by comparative studies. The ways of narrating of Adichie and Couto present traces of resistance that are essential to the subversion of hegemonic discourses bringing up conceptual standards that go beyond cultural belonging, as traditionally imagined. By means of resistance of the characters, the double writing that permeates Adichie and Couto writing reveal itself by bringing up a reconceptualization of culture incorporated in a sense of ambivalence, which deterritorialization generates by generating hybrid cultures. That multiple writing instrumentalizes the language used by the authors, in order to make it a power tool. To give theoretical support to the literary analysis of the works and reflect on the themes contained in this study, I seek support in Stuart Hall (1996, 2001, 2008), Frantz Fanon (1979, 2008), Homi Bhabha (2005), Gayatri Spivak (1997), Ana Mafalda Leite (2003, 2012), Carmen Lucia Tindó Ribeiro Secco (2000), Walter Mignolo (2003), Michelle Perrot (2007, 2003), Anibal Quijano (1999, 2003), Nestor Garcia Canclini Thomas Bonnici (2000, 2011), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1989), Paul Gilroy (2003), Tomaz Tadeu Silva (2003), Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari (1995, 1996), Roland Barthes (1975, 1978, 1999, 2004, 2004a, 2005) among others.