Ecologia delle memorie’. Il romanzo brasiliano di testimonianza della dittatura e la costruzione di un’alternativa epistemica

The essay discusses the testimonial aspects of the novels K. Relato de uma busca (2011), by Bernardo Kucinski and Não falei (2004), by Beatriz Bracher, through an interdisciplinary analysis, grounded on the contemporary discussion on memory, testimony, literature and authoritarianism, especially in the Latin American context, as well as on decolonial criticism and sociology. The work purpose is to read the literature of testimony as a form of political resistance to an epistemic violence underlying in the official rhetoric of silence about the Brazilian military dictatorship crimes (1964-85), and to read it as a narrative bearing that ‘precarious knowledge’ proper of traumatic memories. In this double sense, the essay relates the performative function and the formal characteristics of writing with the counter-epistemological proposal of an “ecology of knowledge” formulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to think the novels as pieces of a possible ‘ecology of memories’.