Rastros, ladeiras e becos de memórias coloniais: interpelações literárias a uma cidade tombada

Abstract

Traversing epistemic paths distinct from hegemonic ones, this article attempts a poetic-critical investigation of the city of São Cristóvão, Sergipe, using literature as both a research method and language. Inspired by Conceição Evaristo's fragmentary weaving and Benjamin's conceptions of experience and narrative, the text proposes a fabulatory writing that rejects the frameworks consecrated to official history and urban patrimonialization. To this end, it uses the fictional figure of a boy, his red bicycle, and his urban narrative. From this emerge images, traces, and affects that destabilize celebratory discourses on historical heritage, revealing the persistent presence of coloniality in the city's alleys and hillsides. By intertwining literature and urban space, the proposal shifts the academic gaze to an epistemology of urban alleys—a marginal and insurgent geography, where coloniality and resistance to it are narrated through fragments, silences, and forbidden voices. Literature here does not illustrate: it intervenes, questions and makes us see, allowing the noises of the past to resonate in the present as an ethical, political and aesthetic demand for memory.