Dead people who matter: Poetics and Politics of Restitution in the Literatures of African Indian Ocean

• Grant number: 24/17811-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Comparative Literature
• Principal Investigator: Elena Brugioni
• Grantee: Eliana Milagros Diaz Muñoz
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project Dead people matter: Poetics and politics of restitution in the literatures of the African Indian Ocean is a research proposal located in the fields of Literary Theory and Visual Studies, Postcolonial Theory and Indian Ocean Studies (IOS) and aims to reflect on the emergence of what Georges Didi-Huberman defines as "critical image" or "dialectical image" (1997) in contemporary literatures of the African Indian Ocean. It is a study of dead characters or "incorporeal living" who narrate a story never lived and therefore of subjects, legally and symbolically, deprived of the right to exist. Based on the novels Tropique de la violence (2016) by Natasha Appanah, A Ilha dos mulatos (2021) by Sérgio Raimundo, Le Silence des Chagos (2005, 2016) by Shenaz Patel and the short story "The hotel with two doors" (2005) by João Borges Coelho, the aim is to study the aesthetic and political implications of this critical image as a strategy of restitution in responde to necropolitical mechanisms (Mbembe, 2011) that guide the context of the African Indian Ocean.