A escrevivência na obra Quarto de Despejo, diário de uma favelada, de Carolina Maria de Jesus (1960): raça, resistência e gênero

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the concept of escrevivência developed by Conceição Evaristo (2016) in relation to Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus (1960), highlighting the intersections of race, gender, and resistance in Black Brazilian women’s literature. Its main objective is to understand how escrevivência appears in Carolina Maria de Jesus’s narrative as a form of social denunciation, representation of Black lived experience, and affirmation of marginalized women’s identities. The study is qualitative and bibliographic, drawing on the works of Sueli Carneiro (2011), Djamila Ribeiro (2019), Lélia Gonzalez (1988), bell hooks (1994; 2013), Grada Kilomba (2019), and Angela Davis (2016). Through this theoretical framework, the research demonstrates how Black women’s intellectual production challenges historical mechanisms of exclusion and silencing that have shaped Brazilian society and its literary canon. The analysis shows that Carolina Maria de Jesus’s writing transcends personal testimony and assumes a political and collective dimension by exposing the daily realities of the favelas, hunger, social inequality, and structural racism. In dialogue with the concept of escrevivência, her work highlights Black women as producers of knowledge and transforms writing into a space of resistance and collective memory reconstruction. The dissertation also examines the critical reception of Child of the Dark and the marginalization of Carolina Maria de Jesus as part of a broader historical process that devalued Black intellectuals. It concludes that escrevivência functions as an aesthetic and political practice that legitimizes Black women’s experiences as sources of knowledge, contributing to the reshaping of Brazilian literature and to the development of a pedagogy of resistance grounded in representation and plural voices