Por novas narrativas de gênero: A jornada Heroica em A Mulher Rei e Njinga Mbandi

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the heroic journey in the cinematic production The King Woman under the theoretical parameters of Joseph Campbell and Clyde Ford. Starting from Joseph Campbell's monomyth from the work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and the criticism produced by Clyde Ford in The hero with an African face: myths of Africa (1999) with the racialized focus on mythological studies. Bearing in mind that Joseph Campbell primarily enabled the restitution of the primary function of mythology: catharsis, emancipation and re-elaboration through the heroic archetype, restructuring it into three acts: separation, initiation and return. However, Clyde Ford noted that, like so many other areas of knowledge, mythological studies were permeated by ethnocentrism as they disregarded and made various cultural expressions on the subject unfeasible. Taking on the challenge, Ford dedicates himself to traditional African mythology, which was once marginalized and inferiorized by the mythological school, and translates such local cultural expressions into the common elementary symbols of humanity. However, both theoretical references still proved to be insufficient for the object of analysis due to the lack of a genre record. I then draw on the theoretical contributions of the African philosopher Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí in The invention of women: constructing an African sense for Western gender discourses (2021) and the North American intellectual and philosopher bell hooks Black gazes: race and representation (1992) with the aim to mitigate the gaps in the proposed racialized gender debate. I use Oyèrónkẹ's theoretical perspective on gender from pré-colonial Africa and hooks' historical reconstruction of the representation of black women in the diaspora, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the crossings that make up the proposed objects. Criticizing the psychosocial implications of racist and sexist representations of the black population, I propose a critical analysis of the Western category of woman and invest in the emancipatory capacity that other forms of representation can result in. Therefore, artistic representation and the structure of society are homologous and reflect the structural preferences: aesthetic, political and social of a people. They are concrete manifestations of the conception of nature and existence. They articulate the ontological thinking of a society.