Weaving An Affective Economy Onto (Post)Colonial Narratives Of Diaspora: Black Brazilian Women In The United Kingdom

This research discusses the affective economy in the lives of Black Brazilian women who live in the United Kingdom. I use ‘affect’ as part of what circulates in the ways identifications and social encounters happen situated in particular standpoints (lugar de fala). To understand the weaving process of expressing and identifying Blackness and being Black, I centred the voices of Black Brazilian women as participants in conversations during the fieldwork. Along with their voices at the centre, Black feminist and decolonial literature established the epistemological framework for the ‘ethnographicness’, ethics of caring and discourse analysis deployed in this research. The concept of coloniality of power has a relevant connotation in the ways that oppressions have been naturalised and legitimised at the institutional level. The British Racial Contract has a particular affective economy in such coloniality of power when Black Brazilian women make use of institutional services or in their daily process of making home. Herstories reveal that oppressions, agency and liberation are lived individually and also shared by the commonalities that resistance and coloniality of power enact. This shows that the affective economy disrupts binary understandings of how Blackness and being Black means. Instead, it complicates the narratives and the analysis of multiple possibilities of performing Black and Blackness, using dis-identifications processes (being Amefricaladina) as a systemic denial of the place that coloniality allocated to Black women.