A insurgência da flâneuse negra em litania da velha, de Arlete Nogueira da Cruz: um olhar decolonial sobre a experiência subalterna do espaço

Abstract

This research aims at analyzing the insurgency of the black flâneuse in the narrative poem Litania da Velha (2002), by Arlete Nogueira da Cruz, a writer from Maranhão. The study is developed in the light of the social anthropology of decolonial studies with a commitment to the decentralization of space and the concept of flâneur — the poet of the asphalt — as it tries to criticize the meanings of colonial and capitalist modernity in the nineteenth century, the stage of the bourgeois man who experiences the city. The debate, therefore, leads to an analysis of gender, race, and class relations, aiming to understand how the experience of being, space, and modernity itself is changeable according to these intersections and the location of the subject. For this purpose, the discussions consider the insurgency of the flâneuse woman in Latin America, which has received little attention from literary criticism and the sociological studies that constitute the flâneur. This study is bibliographic and has as a theoretical framework the implications concerning the decolonial feminism discussed by Lélia Gonzalez (2020) and María Lugones (2014); the minutiae of the female wanderer observed by Thiane Nunes (2022) and Priscilla Ferguson (1994); and the reflections on the space of inequality proposed by Regina Dalcastagnè (2012, 2015), Milton Santos (2001), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007). The research concludes that, along the journey of the old black beggar woman, the space is not neutral and homogeneous, but rather a relational construction involving the colonialities that reverberate the subaltern condition of the character and, therefore, influence the woman’s experiences and the determination of her location in the city. Therefore, due to her ceaseless movement, it is noticed that the Old black flâneuse builds decolonial paths that destabilize the fossilized place of experiencing the city to (re)exist for her own (sub)existence.