Quilombo as World-making: Technologies of Vitality

Abstract

This article investigates how vitality can be theorised and sustained in the face of colonial regimes of violence historically oriented toward the dispossession and destruction of multiple forms of existence and sociability. It asks how one might learn from anticolonial practices without reiterating the epistemic violence embedded in hegemonic regimes of knowledge and official archives. Engaging with both challenges, this work learns with the activations of quilombo not as a fixed historical object but as a set of practices, relations, and technologies of vitality. Methodologically, the article adopts a dialogic and transdisciplinary approach that brings written knowledge into conversation with oral traditions, visuality, and sound. It attends to the visual and sonic textures of the film Orí (1989), directed by Raquel Gerber in collaboration with Beatriz Nascimento, alongside Nascimento’s writings as a historian and poet. The analysis is further informed by conversations with Erica Malunguinho, founder of the urban quilombo Aparelha Luzia and an elected representative under the Mandata Quilombo (2018–2022). Together, these ontoepistemologies foreground quilombo as an anticolonial praxis of world-making that refuses archival capture while generating forms of life, political imagination, and relations otherwise.