"Here everything is an exile": colonial violence, banishment, testimony and survival

Abstract

The article takes from African-Brazilian and African-American literatures to analyse how they bring critical events such as the abductions from Africa, the Middle Passage and slavery in Americas into question in order to propose an aesthetic gesture, addressed both to the present (calling attention to how the dispositif of race produces Black experience as an impossibility to feel at home, in everyday life and in claiming citizenship) and to the past and future. This is achieved by affirming all lives lost in those catastrophic events as grievable, a crucial strategy of care which, despite its limits, can be seen as a re-inscription of the dead and of oneself into a weave of living relationships. This aesthetic gesture can assume different forms, like to use speech and to inhabit language (even if it is the colonizer’s one).