Women of the Brown Atlantic: Real and Imaginary Passages in Portuguese 1711-2011

巴西有句谚语：如果你走在彩虹下，你就有改变性别的危险。追逐彩虹，在彩虹下行走，这是两位重要的非洲裔巴西女作家卡罗莱纳·玛丽亚·德·耶稣（1914-1977）和康塞桑·埃瓦里斯托（1946-）的作品中排练的一个动作。这个故事将记忆的行为比作一个不可能的彩虹追逐，这导致身体的重新定位，远离分类（性别作为社会结构），走向意想不到的（同性恋身份）。他们对彩虹故事的参与构成了这个项目的理论核心，该项目将性别差异和酷儿身份作为思考布朗女性流动性和记忆形成的关键驱动力（即，lusophone）大西洋。在巴西，彩虹的形象倾向于与Orisha Oxumaré联系在一起，Orisha Oxumaré是Candomblé非洲裔巴西人宗教中的男女蛇一样的运动和周期之神（Verger 2002），拥有改变人们性别的力量。这个项目采用了Oxumaré的象征，彩虹，可以说比LGBT运动的彩虹旗更奇怪，以修改档案隐喻的使用及其与海洋的历史共谋。彩虹故事没有强调流散流动和逆流，这是现有的（奇怪的）流散流动理论的典型，而是强调了一种时间性（“追逐”），这种时间性是奇怪的，因为它指向了记忆和身份的不可能位置。为了开拓这一更广泛的研究，该奖学金将重点关注“棕色大西洋”记忆形成过程的特殊性，“棕色大西洋”一词是指基于葡萄牙语、文化和血液注入的非洲大西洋文化相互联系。（Almeida，2004年）。在解决黑人妇女长期被排除在批评范式之外的问题时，该奖学金考虑了黑人女性和白色男性在文学中对棕色大西洋地区黑人女性流动性的记忆和想象。创新的方法将质疑明确界定的国家，性别和种族界限，有利于记忆和想象运动的跨国方式。此外，对想象力的强调将打破散居的线性模式，探索出从出发地到目的地的旅行之外的不可预测的“蓝天”路线。这些对应于偶然的想象之旅所产生的记忆路线，由于它们拒绝被轻易存档，使得今天对空间、档案和可追踪运动的理论强调对它们的记忆力量负责。最后，通过使用彩虹作为理论透镜，该项目将研究旅行的理论和电影表演（人和思想的文字旅行），以及日记，小说，短篇小说和信件（故事的旅行）。研究将在国际会议上与来自不同学科的学者进行讨论，并在埃克塞特的住校学者计划中开幕。将提交给Palgrave MacMillan出版社的一本专著（记忆研究丛书）的产出将对大西洋葡语系和非洲裔巴西文学的研究作出重大贡献。与巴西的非洲-巴西博物馆和葡萄牙的拉各斯国家博物馆的合作将促进知识交流，并为制作一本流动性视频书、一张互动的流动性地图和一个艺术展览提供材料，这些都是为更广泛的公众设计的。但它使我能够对葡语国家之间的关系进行一个更加雄心勃勃的调查，通过关注跨越三个世纪的不太明显的记忆形成过程。最终，它认为黑人女性的流动性与构成棕色大西洋的国家的历史仍然相关。

There is a saying in Brazil that goes like this: if you walk under the rainbow you run the risk of changing your sex. Running after, and walking under, the rainbow is a movement that is rehearsed in the work of two key Afro-Brazilian women writers, Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) and Conceição Evaristo (1946-). The story compares the act of remembering to an impossible rainbow chase, which results in a bodily re-orientation away from classification (sex as social construction) and towards the unanticipated (identity as queer). Their engagement with the rainbow story forms the theoretical core of this project, which takes gender difference and queer identity as the key drivers for thinking about female mobility and memory making in the Brown (i.e., lusophone) Atlantic. In Brazil, the image of the rainbow is tendentiously associated with the Orisha Oxumaré, the male-female snake-like God of movements and cycles in the Candomblé Afro-Brazilian religion (Verger 2002), who holds the power to change people's sex. This project takes Oxumaré's symbol, the rainbow, arguably queerer than the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement, so as to revise the use of the archive metaphor and its historical complicity with the maritime. Rather than emphasising flows and crosscurrents, which typify existing theories of (queer) diasporic mobility, the rainbow story highlights a temporality ("running after") that is queer because it points to the impossible location of memory and identity. In order to open up this wider research, the Fellowship will focus on the particularities of memory making processes of the "Brown Atlantic," a term that names an African-based Atlantic cultural interconnectedness based on the infusion of Portuguese language, culture and blood (Almeida 2004).In tackling black women's long-term omission from critical paradigms, the Fellowship considers the ways in which black female mobility in the Brown Atlantic has been remembered and imagined, in literature, by both black women and white men. The innovative methodology will question sharply defined national, sexual and racial boundaries, favouring transnational ways of remembering and imagining movement. Furthermore, the emphasis on imagination will upset the linear patterns of the diaspora by exploring unpredictable, "blue skies" routes beyond origin-destination travelling. These correspond to routes of memory arising from serendipitous imaginary journeys that, in their refusal to be easily archived, render today's theoretical emphasis on space, archives and traceable movement accountable for their power over memory. Finally, by using the rainbow as a theoretical lens, the project will examine theories and cinematic performances that travel (literal travelling of people and ideas), and diaries, novels, short stories and letters (travelling of stories).Research will be discussed with scholars from a variety of disciplines at international conferences and in the context of a scholar in residence programme to be inaugurated at Exeter. The output of a monograph, to be submitted to Palgrave MacMillan Press (Memory Studies series), will make a major contribution to studies of the Lusophone Atlantic and Afro-Brazilian literature. Collaborations with the Museu Afro-Brasileiro in Brazil and the Núcleo Museológico de Lagos in Portugal will lead to knowledge exchange and provide material for the development of a Video Book of Mobilities, an interactive Map of Mobilities and an artistic exhibition, designed for the wider public.The project builds on my existing work on contemporary women's writing from Mozambique and Portugal, but enables me to undertake a substantially more ambitious interrogation of the relationship between lusophone nations by focusing on less visible processes of memory making across three centuries. Ultimately, it argues for the continued relevance of black female mobility to the history of the nations that make up the Brown Atlantic.