Da estória à história: uma leitura transdisciplinar de Torto Arado

Abstract

Given the realization that the colonial past still haunts our reality, this dissertation focuses on the novel Torto arado (Crooked Plow), by the author Itamar Vieira Junior, which tells the story of the sisters Bibiana and Belonísia, residents of the Água Negra farm, in the interior of Chapada Diamantina, where, even after years of the formal abolition of slavery in Brazil, families of African descent are subjected to slave labor, without the right to wages or to labor rights. At the same time, the book also revisits the history of our country, exposing the violence under which the nation was formed and which to this day reproduce social inequalities. With the analysis of Torto arado, the objective, using a transdisciplinary theoretical contribution, is to demonstrate how this work retells the history of Brazil — or of a part of Brazil, which has been suppressed over the years. Contradicting the colonizing narrative and overcoming old beliefs, such as the myth of racial democracy, it is concluded that Torto arado privileges the perspective of historically subordinated characters and, thus, founds not a national identity, but a cultural identity.