Children’s literature with black characters: decolonizing narratives for new identity and world constructions

Abstract

This article starts with reflections on the fabrication process of a single history, which elects and values a certain worldview over all others in the historical-cultural formation of a people or a nation, legitimizing and transmitting only one cultural heritage. In Brazil, this discourse has presented the black people as slave, submissive, inferior... At school, one important way of transmitting such discourse is the stories present in children’s literature which suggest patterns of what is true, good and beautiful, based on white and heteronormativity supremacy. This article analyzes and problematizes, in an interdisciplinary way, two stories of the contemporary children’s literature which provokes the denaturalization of colonized and dualist relations: between good and evil, right and wrong, beautiful and grotesque, included and excluded. These stories mobilize discourses of Africanities and blackness for the empowerment of black children. As observed in the field research in a public school in the city of São Paulo, as the educators read to and with the children they enable black bodies’ rereading and rewriting, considering gender and ethnicity intersectionality, allowing readers to broaden views of themselves and of the world.