Serendipitous Encounters with Texts: Errantry and Decentralization in Ana Maria Gonçalves’s Um Defeito de Cor (2006)

Abstract

Since the turn of the century, several Afro-Brazilian writers have taken to engage critically with Brazil’s colonial past and the absence of Afro-Brazilian voices in historical and literary discourses. Ana Maria Gonçalves’s 2006 published novel Um Defeito de Cor is a paradigmatic example of this emerging corpus as it recuperates the history of the Malê Revolt in Salvador (1835) and envisions the life of its leading figure, Luísa Mahin. This article looks into the representation of hegemonic spaces of centre and periphery in Um Defeito de Cor and the intertextual relations drawn in the narrative through the lens of the Afro-Caribbean philosopher and writer Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. It argues that Um Defeito de Cor builds on the motif of serendipity to carry out a narrative of errantry and decentralization and disclose concealed Afro-Brazilian discourses in intertextual relations.