Entrelaces da resistência: comunicação e práticas emancipatórias de mulheres negras trançadeiras da Amazônia

Abstract

This research focuses on the emancipatory practices of black women hair braiders living in Amazônia, in Belém Pará. We understand braiding activity as communicative experience of resistance, economic autonomy, and overcoming the oppressions that affect black Amazonian women. The braid, for black women and men, is not just a matter of aesthetics or vanity it represents an encounter with African ancestry and the affirmation of an historically relegated identity by a racist society. For Nilma Lino Gomes (2019), hair and body can be considered expressions of Brazilian black identity, since they are symbols of relations of violence and ethnic racial inequalities. The objective of this work is to understand, in light of communication and social sciences, the crossings that women hair braiders experience on issues concerned to racism, black identity, coloniality, ancestry, territoriality, and resistance. We understand that braiding culture in Amazônia enables singular forms of communication divergent from the logic of the capitalist and colonialist white patriarchal system. As methodological paths inspired by Kilomba (2019), we conducted an investigation focused on the individuals, through non-directive interviews (in depth) with black women hair braiders, who work in the city of Belém Pará. From the reports extracted from this dialogue, we interweave a decolonial and Afrodiasporic epistemology, in which the women's narratives are what show us the paths of research. We are supported by Muniz Sodré's (2014) notion of the organization of the bond and the “common”, Paulo Freire's (2018) critical theory, Grada Kilomba's (2019), bell hooks' (2017) and Nilma Lino Gomes' (2019) reflections on race and gender, and Zélia Amador de Deus' (2019) and Vicente Salles' (1971) perspective on blackness in Amazônia, among others. The emancipatory practices of women hair braiders happen through overcoming economic difficulties, in solidarity, in the valorization of a black, feminist, and Amazonian identity, and above all, in the communicative relationship of black ancestry promoted by braiding.