Marilene Felinto: anti-fascist and counter-colonial writing

Abstract

We present a general analysis of twenty-three opinion articles and four reviews by Marilene Felinto published in Gama Revista, a publication of the Nexo Jornal Group and the Universo Online – UOL website, between February 2023 and September 2024. We used countercolonial methodologies to analyse the data (Spyer Dulci, T. M.; Rocha Malheiros, M., 2021; Fernandes, 2023), interested in problematising how the author erases colonial processes of subjectivation and what place she reserves in her writing for the dominant episteme and for counter-hegemonic knowledges. How does it resist coloniality and its techniques of dispossession for political and economic gain? We conclude that the corpus of research studied welcomes historically silenced voices and challenges the white patriarchal canon, questions the white male commercial media and protests against the shameful concentration of income. Anti-fascist and counter-colonial, the writing of Felinto - a woman, black and leftist, as she describes herself - is an important piece of critical analysis of Brazilian reality. Poetic and ironic, it echoes current anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist and ecological struggles, questioning the transparency of social reality, the promiscuity between large neoliberal corporations and modern/colonial politics. Above all, against the backdrop of a bureaucratic and self-centred life, by putting the struggles and dreams of dissident subjects on the agenda, her critical and acidic writing re-enacts the poetics needed to reinvent life.