Power and dominance relations based on the internal and external chronotopes identified in “Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus”

Abstract

Writing is representing time and space. It is to perpetuate, through creativity and experience, distinct realities that blend with the fictional imagery constructed by the author. Thus, the present work addresses the relations of power and dominance perceptible in the work Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus (1960), based on the different types of chronotopes, both internal and external, that the book allows us to infer. The objective is to identify how spatio-temporal elements, given the chronotopic dimensions of Carolina de Jesus’s discourse, contribute to a social representation marked by injustice regarding relations of domination and might. In this sense, the approach, which is descriptive and bibliographic in nature, will be conducted analytically to contemplate a female autobiography constructed through the diary genre. This is done in view of the theoretical framework necessary for characterizing the chronotopes present in the narrative, through the lens of Bakhtin’s theory (2018), as well as the considerations of Machado (2012), Bakhtin and Volochínov (2012), and others regarding social, discursive, and linguistic interactions. The accounts of a black woman, socially and economically marginalized, regarding her life will be problematized to foster an understanding of the interferences of chronotopic dimensions in discourse.