“Sou quilombo com orgulho muito de quem eu sou”: letramentos em histórias de vida de mulheres quilombolas piauienses.

Abstract

Faced with the gradual growth of studies in the area of Language Sciences focused on the discussion of literacy theories, we still consider the number of studies dedicated to the study of social literacies in quilombola communities to be incipient. Due to the scarcity of research in this area, and considering my experience as a teacher with a class in the government's Women of Tomorrow program in 2013, the challenge arose to explore this perspective, based on the life stories of women from two quilombola communities in Piauí. This thesis is based on the need to find answers to the following questions: how do literacy practices occur in the life stories of quilombola women? To what extent do these practices have an impact on their daily lives? Thus, our main objective is to investigate the impacts of literacy on the life stories of 13 quilombola women from the Piauí communities of Barro Vermelho and Contente, analyzing how social practices of reading, writing, and orality influence their quilombola identity. Our corpus consists of 13 life stories told by these women, collected through semi-structured interviews in two quilombola communities located in the interior of the state of Piauí. For the analysis, we started from the assumption that ideological literacy is constituted by social reading and writing practices experienced in multiple contexts of social interaction and, for this reason, the stories were analyzed considering social and cultural aspects. To this end, we drew on the theory of the New Literacy Studies with authors such as (Barton et al., 2000); Barton and Hamilton (2004); Soares (2003; 2010); Street (1984; 2006; 2010; 2014); Kleiman (1995)as well as the foundations of Sociolinguistic Studies Bortoni-Ricardo (2005); Zavala (2002)and the principles of the relationship between oral-based and written-based societies in the light of studies by Goody and Watt (1963; 2006), among others. The results show that not only in the life stories of quilombola women, but also in the physical space of the communities, there is a multiplicity of literacy events, present in various social domains and delineated by different ideological literacy practices. This helps to ensure that the relationship between literacy and the social identity of the participants in this study occurs as naturally as possible. This research thus aims to contribute to recognizing the plurality of literacies in the life stories of quilombola women. In addition to signaling a more efficient expansion of the possibilities for rescuing and preserving these life stories, which emerge in contexts of resistance and struggle.