Between theory and freedom

pluralizing the archives of International Relations from critical fabulations about Esperança Garcia

Abstract

In this article, I seek to productively engage with the silence and violence contained in the available archives on the lives of Afro-Brazilian women in captivity by broadening and deepening the concept (and practice) of theorizing developed by black, post-colonial, decolonial, and post-structuralist feminists. Particularly, by questioning the archives of the discipline of International Relations considered legitimate and neutral, I seek to present other ways of conceiving epistemology through the relationship between black feminist literature, Saidiya Hartman's concept of critical fabulation, and the concept of critical interruption as proposed by David Kazanjian. Instead of trying to fill in the silences of the sparse colonial archive about the lives of black women in captivity, this exercise allows for a critical imagining of their ways of theorizing about the world around them by interrupting the dominant narratives about them, thus bringing other relationships, dynamics, and experiences as central to the epistemological production and, mainly, to the production of knowledge about the international. To carry out such a movement, I take as an imaginative exercise the scarce archive on Esperança Garcia, a black enslaved woman recognized by the National Bar Association of Brazil, Piauí section, as the first lawyer from Piauí.