Music and orality as forms of literary archaeology the silenced memories of slavery

Main Article Content

M Rocío Cobo Piñero http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3814-7799

Keywords

Gayl Jones, feminine blues, literary archaeology, Quilombo dos Palmares, diaspora

Abstract

This article intends to analyze the literary archaeology undertaken by Gayl Jones, the American writer who makes use of literature as a means for historical review. In her narrative poem, Song for Anninho, Jones combines music, poetry, and orality in order to rebuild the memory of resistance of Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of fugitive slaves founded in Northeastern Brazil in the early seventeenth century. This combination is achieved through the imagination and historical facts and from the feminine perspective that incorporates the modern meanings of the blues. Thereby, this epic poem is actually a hybrid song, which in the voice of a woman, links Brazil and the United States through diaspora and slavery.

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