LITERACIES OF SURVIVAL: WEAVING VOICES AND HISTORIES

Abstract

Survival and narratives are not unrelated phenomena; both are part of the same fabric where survival informs and is informed by narratives. We share a position held by many linguist anthropologists that understands narratives as a mode of action in the world, or a performance. While situating ourselves in an interdisciplinary field, we interweave narratives produced by Janaína and Calazans, coauthors of this article and university students who inhabit peripheral spaces in Rio de Janeiro and promote cultural interventions in their neighborhoods and beyond. In ethnographically listening to the stories of literacy of these young scholars, we intend to highlight the agentive stance of those who were subjected to a subaltern position in modernity but do not surrender passively to writing; they instead engage with writing and consequently transform its meanings, thus constituting themselves as authors of their own histories and reinventing modes of acting, narrating and surviving linguistically and culturally.