Youth, memory and aquilombamento: everyone against epistemicide

Abstract

Starting from a debate that goes beyond the well-known incidence of Black youth mortality in Brazil, this article presents a discussion on the insurgent forms of resistance and reexistence carried out by Black youth. In January 2022, an event provoked a strong commotion within the marginal poetry scene and the MC battle circles of the metropolitan region of Recife. Through the memory of a young poet who was murdered in the city center, a cartography is drawn that highlights the need to make visible strategies that rely on the right to memory and quilombismo to confront epistemicide. What does the life of peripheral cultural subjects tell us about the exercise of the right to the city, the enjoyment of the urban space, and access to culture? How does a poet who is now deceased remain alive in the city's memory? How does this memory affect those who were close to him? And finally, how does all this come together in a debate on epistemicide, political-cultural activism, and the right to memory? In this text, the term memory is considered a psychosocial element that, alongside a quilombismo-inspired perspective, contributes to resisting the erasures promoted by coloniality. Establishing a practice of reviving memories is a way of acting in defense of the very resistance of existence.