Epistemologias do axé: corpo, memória e de(s)colonialidade na dança afro-brasileira

Abstract

“Exú killed a bird yesterday with the stone he will only throw tomorrow.” This Yoruba maxim announces a conception of time that disrupts linearity and causality, returning to experience the power to produce meaning. It is within this fold of spiral time that this research is situated. This dissertation investigates Orixá dance as a language of resistance, self-writing, and a legitimate field of knowledge production, understanding the Afro-diasporic body as a territory of memory, creation, and crossing, sustained by axé and ancestral cosmoperceptions that precede Western modern logic. Grounded in autoethnography and performative writing, the research articulates ritual, autobiography, fiction, and critical reflection, assuming the body as a living archive and an epistemological operator. The writing unfolds as a spiral experience, breaking with temporal and methodological linearity in order to affirm the crossroads as a procedure for creation and thought. The fictional narratives, experiences in the terreiro, and the artistic processes developed within the project “Um Quê de Negritude” and the Collective Boca 07 constitute the empirical corpus, articulating scene, ritual, and memory as inseparable fields of knowledge production. In dialogue with authors such as Martins (2021), Rufino (2019; 2023), Santos (2002; 2023), Silva (2016; 2021), Moura (2019), Prandi (2001), Bento (2022), Césaire (2021), Schucman (2014), Nogueira (2020), Lima (2023), Côrtes, Santos and Andraus (2020), Ferreira (2008; 2011), and Fernandes (2013), the study challenges the structures of coloniality and whiteness that continue to regulate modes of aesthetic, pedagogical, and epistemological legitimation in Brazilian performing arts. Orixá dance is affirmed not as a technical repertoire or folkloric expression, but as a contracolonial practice of invention, thought, and existence. Recognizing Afro-Brazilian dances as complex systems of knowledge allows dance to be repositioned as a living language of ancestry, in which the body becomes archive, crossroads, and a gesture of temporal reconfiguration.