Resenhas - Plantation Memories

Eliza 20/05/2019

What an incredible, powerful, radical book. In this work, Grada Kilomba, an artist, poet, scholar and cultural critic, brings together all of the elements of her persona into the writing. In framing writing as an act of becoming, she names her force in this book: she names what has remained unnamed, tells untold stories, reinforces in radical fashion what racism looks like and what it does to the individuals exposed to it. She calls out Academia for reproducing the colonial order in deeming certain discourses as scientific, and other as militant. She defends the need to theorize from a place of anger where one allows subjective discourse to flow, as a means to recovering a humanity that was lost in colonization, and that is gradually – in a rather subtle fashion – destroyed with the perpetuation of everyday racism. What Kilomba does with narrowing down the spheres which encompass a subject is remarkable and didactic. Through her take on each of the spheres – individual, political and social – and the attention she brings to the damaging force of racism, she exposes the subtle everyday modes of oppression as what they actually are: violent acts which destroy black people’s subjectivity with the intention of transforming them into an “other”. Kilomba’s illustrations and interviews pointing out mundane cases in which racist discourse is perpetrated are an excellent addition to her overall argument: That recovering the black selfhood is about ending racism and beginning self-definition. That such strength comes from the denouncing of racist acts, the expression of anger and the writing of a narrative that puts together the historically fragmented pieces of the black self.