Paper short abstract:

Can Afro-descendant performances be understood as corporeal and oral narratives? What does it mean to perform these narratives in the streets of São Paulo? This paper focuses on these "alternative" narratives and on the memories and histories that they tell, challenging the hegemonic ones.

Paper long abstract:

The present paper focuses on the Bloco Afro Ilú Obá de Min, a Brazilian street carnival group that was born in 2004 and has been active in São Paulo for fifteen years. Today the group is formed by 400 black and white women and defines itself as a "feminine entity", working to preserve and to diffuse the black culture; and to strengthen and to empower the black women in the Brazilian society. Every weekend, the bloco's women occupy different urban public spaces, performing rhythms, songs, dances and spiritualities of African matrix, that become ways of revindication of its African ancestry and resistance against racism and sexism.

This paper, particularly, tries to understand the bloco's Afro-descendant performances as corporeal and oral narratives that tell memories and histories silenced along the centuries, but not forgotten by those who continue to tell them with their own bodies and voices. From this point of view, these "alternative" narratives seem to challenge the white hegemonic Brazilian memory, claiming the black presence within the Brazilian society and, at the same time, reactivating and generating "alternative" memories, epistemologies and knowledges too.