LITERATURE, THEORY, AND DECOLONIZATION: A POETICS OF CULTURAL REORIENTATION QUA STRATEGY OF RESISTANCE

Abstract

This essay traces a critical inter-American map of how literature and theory decolonize colonialities of being. By starting from what Édouard Glissant (1992) has theorized as our “common experience broken in time” – this “nonhistory” with pan‑American writers in search of a temporal and spatial continuum, it is guided by the following questions: what is the decolonizing role of literature and theory in the contemporary scenario of interconnected crises? What types of home are represented in literary texts delineating diverse cultural contexts characterized by transculturation, translocation, violence and local and global in-betweenness? In the process, it elaborates trails qua tentative answers within the field of Comparative Literature and its theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary methodologies with the objective of problematizing the relation between literature/theory, culture, and decolonization at the colonialism-coloniality interface.

Keywords

• literatura/teoria
• cultura
• memória
• entre lugar
• descolonização.