Epistemic injustice and decolonial resistance in contemporary Brazilian north-eastern literature and cinema

Abstract

This study scrutinises four seminal works from Northeast Brazil: the novels Viva o Povo Brasileiro by João Ubaldo Ribeiro (1984) and Torto Arado (2019) by Itamar Vieira Junior (2019), along with the films A Idade da Terra (1980) by Glauber Rocha, and Bacurau (2019) by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. A comparative analysis of these works juxtaposed against their respective sociopolitical contexts, namely the military dictatorship from 1964–1985 and the post-2013 political cycle culminating in Jair Bolsonaro's presidential election in 2019, reveals persistent decolonial themes within their fictional universes that echo the political landscapes of their respective eras. Considering Northeast Brazil’s unique colonial past, marked by exploitation, displacement, and cultural erasure, the works in the corpus are approached as representative instances of a wider cross-generational decolonial tradition among Northeast Brazilian authors and filmmakers. Despite their varied perspectives, they similarly address the persistent effects of systemic racial and ethnic discrimination targeted at Indigenous and African-diasporic populations within their microcosms. By portraying their characters drawing upon oral traditions, ancestral wisdom, and communal memory to counter dominant narratives, the selected works emphasise the importance of historical attachment to their resistance against epistemicide while also drawing a parallel to the historical trajectory of certain marginalised populations in Brazil. An in-depth exploration into the implementation of decolonial strategies by the depicted communities accentuates the pivotal role of epistemic resistance in their survival. For instance, the cultivation of systems of distributed knowledge and the fostering of productive cultures of dissent are consistently employed by multiple generations of these fictional communities as a means of tackling colonial power structures and knowledge systems that have historically marginalized non-European cultures and epistemologies.