Ensaiando decolonialidade : o gênero ensaio como possibilidade de insurgência na escrita acadêmica

Abstract

With the reflections and discussions woven throughout this research, I seek to reveal traces of decoloniality in the perspective of insurgencies in academic writing and in the academic essay genre. Accomplishing this objective implies recognizing decoloniality as a way of legitimizing another academic writing, decentralized from the Eurocentric and colonial axis in which the hegemonic standards of knowledge were established. It also implies that this writing reaches plural epistemologies, especially the subalternized ones, and that it promotes new ways of producing, registration and legitimizing knowledge, insofar as it “authorizes” other knowledge, other bodies, other epistemes to speak, in a broader conception of decoloniality of knowledge(s). The path I follow is through language studies, more specifically academic writing and the discursive genres that constitute it. I am based on the fact that the study of language is a viable way to break barriers between text, context, writer, reader and the social reality in which these elements are arranged and, considering language practices as the materialization of life in all its senses and meanings. I present this study in the form of a discussion, through which I problematize and put to the test some paradigms of the coloniality of knowledge that are rooted, solidified in the academic field and permeate all its functioning, operation and products originated from it. I call attention to an ignored way of conceiving scientific work, in its methodological form, registration and discourse, the academic essay and, for this reason, I try to break free writing, an irregular rhetoric, a method considered unscientific, permeated by subjectivities and by a plural, insurgent reason. I develop a reflective analysis about the writing of the selected essay-object, identifying unconventional characteristics in its form of registration, but also and mainly in the way in which the experience of writing is narrated, which in fact is an insurgency. In this way, for this small but significant movement, I say that yes, the essay genre represents a real possibility to promote insurgencies in academic writing, mainly because it presents critical-reflexive characteristics in its configuration and, therefore, welcomes subjectivity and the many ways of conceiving knowledge. I recognize that other academic genres can lend themselves to this role, but with much more restrictions than the essay, for the reasons given. And, finally, I want to wake up to the importance and urgency of creating new spaces and a new look at the knowledge of diversity, born mainly from minority groups and marginalized by the rancidity of coloniality, in academia and society, in other words, a more receptive, human and free look at academic writing.