Go "Na Raça", sister: I was "Na Raça", I won "Na

Go “Na Raça”, sister: I was “Na Raça”, I won “Na Raça” I live “Na Raça”!

Author: Antonia Gabriela Pereira de Araujo (Harvard University, United States)
Speaker: Antonia Gabriela Pereira de Araujo
Topic: Language, Gender, Sexuality
The (SCOPUS / ISI) GLOCAL AFALA 2023 General Session

Abstract

This text offers an analysis of how words, signs, and symbols forge the senses and meanings of the subjectivities of black girls in Brazil. The term Raçuda and its derivations often used to define black girls, offers a safe route for an investigative and analytical trajectory on how the expressions “live na raça” and “go na raça” leave evidence to describe practices of racialization of bodies through language and also the symbiotic interrelation of language and the political experience of life in contexts of extreme racialization. This study includes the racial and linguistic dimensions of the construction of black subjectivity, while situating observation, description, and analysis in a multitude of fields, such as black studies and gender performativity studies, but with the semiotic and the cultural at the center of all perspectives and analyses.

Keywords: semiotics, racialization, body and linguistic landscape.