The epistemological decolonization through the death by eye of childhood: analysis of Mia Couto literature

Abstract

This article consist a comparative analysis of “O beijo da palavrinha” and “A chuva pasmada”, both works from the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, addressed to young people and children. The objective is to investigate the consonance and the differences of literary treatments given to the themes of death and childhood, as also to analyze, from these treatments, the historical and cultural processes that allow to equal the colonial heritage in the social and political context in Moçambique .The children’s role and the literary representations of families facing death allows us to reflect about childhood as a place of transit and cultural production; that consequently shifts the adult role and social institutions and to also suggest the constitutive socio multiplicity of an individual cultural and social identities. By such displacements, we aim to observe literary proposals regarding the corpus of those works, sustaining the need to improve the process of political and epistemological decolonization of marginalized social spaces, including the modernity and the capitalist world-system as the double face of colonialism.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21881/abriluff.2016n17a373