Mulheres de letras e lutas: a proeminência das intelectuais Maria Firmina dos Reis e Harriet Ann Jacobs no quilombismo epistêmico do Atlântico Negro, 1810-1860

Abstract

The objective of this study is to provide an investigation into how 19th-century Black intellectual women, with emphasis on Maria Firmina dos Reis in Brazil and Harriet Ann Jacobs in the United States, produced a quilombista praxis of memory, care, and resistance through literature. Their literary works, Úrsula, romance original brasileiro (1860), and Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself (1861), respectively, will be analyzed as historical sources for forging a legacy that challenges colonial structures and expands the critical repertoire concerning freedom, community, and historical imagination in the Black Atlantic. By comparing Firmina and Jacobs, the praxis of organizing an epistemic quilombismo among black intellectuals of the nineteenth century is observed - a hypothesis upheld by this thesis regarding the inauguration of an afro-diasporic epistemological tradition. Furthermore, this is a comparative study of the abolitionist interventions of these women in Brazil and the United States, highlighting convergences and singularities in their discursive strategies of denunciation, resistance, and the reinvention of freedom.