Úrsula (1859), de Maria Firmina dos Reis: o pensamento decolonial na literatura brasileira do século XIX

Abstract

The literary use of words, as a vehicle of ideas and discourses, is a concrete practice of the power of the language from which we have notable examples among the writers of our continent, especially concerning the cultivation of the decolonial thinking (DUSSEL, 199), and about the seeking for decolonization of the minds, the identities, and the imaginary world of Latin American people. In this context, in the field of Brazilian Literature, there’s a feminine writer, a teacher, a negro and abolitionist woman who took advantage of this power of language to show her vision and her political and ideological position in front of slavery inherent to coloniality, and so she expressed herself against this not humanist action in the 19Th century. The work selected to guide our reflections along this article is the novel Úrsula, published in 1859, by the writer born in the State of Maranhão/Brazil, Maria Firmina dos Reis. Through a bibliographic revision and our literary analysis, we stablish here some considerations about the decolonial background (DORADO MENDEZ, FLECK, 2022) of the writings of this 19^th century novelist and we also reflect about the use of literary texts as paths to show the way women think and the role of women in the Latin American context. As ways of theoretical support for our writing we count on the presumptions by Mignolo (2017), Quijano (1997), Guerra (2007), Lopez (2020), Uber (2022), among others. We highlight the primacy of Reis in expressing the decolonial thinking among the negro Latin American women against slavery and the exploration of human beings.