Literaturas de periferia no Brasil e na França: tradução de ecos e dissonâncias

Abstract

This master’s thesis presents a relational analysis, based on Boaventura Santos’ idea of a “translation theory” (2017 [2004]), of Brazilian and French literature written by authors living in both these countries’ peripheral urban areas. Our main hypothesis is that, despite the historical, social, economic and political differences separating these urban areas, the people living in it must face similar social problems that arise from a common world order. As a matter of fact, thoses spaces are often geographically and socially constituted by harmful policies responsible for the “planet of slums” (DAVIS, 2009) landscape that dominates southern hemisphere’s megacities, and for the cheap labor imported by rich countries in the northern hemisphere. Both these urban phenomena contribute and are at the route of problems such as institutional racism, the marginalization and worsening conditions of poor people’s lives. Since most of the authors whose works we analyze tend to both denounce the invisibility of poor “peripheral” people in literature and legitimize the need and the desire for self-representation, we tried to assemble a diverse body of literature that includes verbal and non-verbal texts. Our main goal is to compare the politics of narrative and the politics of representation that are at stake in these literatures, focusing particularly on the peripheral communities imagined by different authors.