“Sou uma agulha que ferve no meio do palheiro” : rasgando territórios estéticos em "Metade cara, metade máscara", de Eliane Potiguara

Abstract

This research explores the relevance of Contemporary Brazilian Indigenous Literature, focusing on the book "Metade Cara, Metade Máscara" (2018) by Eliane Potiguara. The dissertation discusses how the author challenges and expands the limits of contemporary Brazilian literature, presenting the multiple faces of indigenous writing in its transversality and borders. The choice of this book, among many others written by indigenous women, is justified by its nonspecific feature, attuned to the debates on contemporary aesthetics, as a confluence of various text genres. In addition, it is one of the first works published by indigenous people in Brazil and the first written by an indigenous woman. The study is based on the categories of nonspecificity (Garramuño, 2014), post-autonomy (Ludmer, 2013), experience (Scott, 1999; Anzaldúa, 2021) and indigenous diaspora (Graúna, 2013). The analysis focuses on the aesthetics of Potiguara, whose work transcends the aesthetic limits of literature, creating a heterogeneous discourse that questions universalism and values the hybridity and subjectivity of a contemporary indigenous experience, disrupting the discourse of the indigenous as a myth of the past, showing them as agents of the present. The text is structured in two chapters. The first presents Contemporary Brazilian Indigenous Literature, discussing how it expands the literary territory by inserting counter-hegemonic narratives that reflect the cultural and social diversity of Brazil. The second focuses on “Metade Cara, Metade Máscara”, analyzing how the book and its author, Eliane Potiguara, challenge the literary canon and offer a collective perspective of plural indigenous voices. We aim to show how Potiguara resignifies indigenous literature, by combining the present and the ancestral to envision possible futures, in an exercise of decolonizing imagination that encourages us to rethink the boundaries of the (im)possible and to rewrite futures that transcend hegemonic limitations.