Healing words to go back to the mouth of the river: performative utterance as decolonial practice in Ellen Lima

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/va.v25.n2.2025.215438

Keywords:

Ellen Lima, border thinking, decolonial praxis, reparation grammar

Abstract

The Portuguese language preserves the history of colonial violence against non-white bodies and the languages and epistemologies those memory-bodies preserve. This language also narrates conquests and discoveries of territories and civilizing missions to subjugate the original inhabitants of those spaces. Drawing from decolonial theory, this article explores Ellen Lima’s performative utterances, blending Old Tupi and Portuguese. It argues that they build a decolonial grammar that emerges as a reparation grammar. This is a decolonial praxis that resists and challenges the colonial violence silenced in Portuguese.

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Author Biography

  • Margarida Rendeiro, Nova University of Lisbon

    Integrated Researcher at CHAM, NOVA FCSH. PhD in Portuguese Studies from Kings College, London, an M.A. in Anglo-American Studies and a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Lisbon. She is a Full Researcher at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM), at NOVA University of Lisbon and an Assistant Professor at Lusíada University of Lisbon. She is the Coordinator of the Research Group Transcultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at the CHAM. Her Postdoctorate Research is entitled "Memory and Utopia in Portugal after 1974: The Heirs of the Revolution of April", a research she has conducted as an integrated researcher in CHAM. She co-edited Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities: Literary and Artistic Voices that undo the Lusophone Atlantic (Routledge, 2019) with Federica Lupati and authored The Literary Institution in Portugal since the Thirties: An Analysis under Special Consideration of the Publishing Market (Peter Lang, 2010). She has also participated at several conferences addressing topics on the Lusophone literature and culture ( organized by the American and Portuguese Studies Association, Association of British and Irish Lusitanists and the Association of Contemporary Iberian Studies, among many others) and published articles in several peer-reviewed journals. Her research interests broach questions of contemporary Portuguese literature and cultures, women's studies, cultural and literary resistance and Black Studies.

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Published

2025-04-28

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 2 (2025): Women's Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistance in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Space

Section

Dossiê 46: Literatura de Mulheres: Memórias, Periferias e Resistências no Espaço

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Copyright (c) 2025 Margarida Rendeiro

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How to Cite

RENDEIRO, Margarida. Healing words to go back to the mouth of the river: performative utterance as decolonial practice in Ellen Lima. Via Atlântica, São Paulo, v. 25, n. 2, p. 111–129, 2025. DOI: 10.11606/va.v25.n2.2025.215438. Disponível em: https://revistas.usp.br/viaatlantica/article/view/215438.. Acesso em: 3 jan. 2026.