Otherness and exclusion: the gaze at the other in poetry and narrative

Abstract

This article aims to present two text analytical exercises from the artistic-literary sphere that address increasingly necessary and urgent themes to discuss in the classroom: refugees and black women, minorities that are still absent from many curricula. The analytical exercises of the poem “Army (chusma) of black roses” (2017), written by Cristiane Sobral, and the narrative Two boys of Kakuma (2018), written by Marie Ange Bordas, serve as a proposal for reading activities with students in the final years of elementary education, as they deal with relationships of otherness. These exercises are based on the perspective of Dialogical Discourse Analysis (Brait, 2008), originating from the extensive work on Mikhail Bakhtin and the Circle, in which the other is constitutive of the self. The theoretical foundation is based on the self-other relationship posited by Bakhtin, ([1920/24] 2020) and the concept of otherness (Amorim, 2004). As a result, in our analyses, we point out the centers of values present in literary texts based on the relationship between self and other and, through linguistic-discursive analysis, we lead readers to reflect on themselves and their other.