Batucada: narrativas de mulheres ritmando resistência

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a narrative approach constructed through surrealist ethnography, developed within the Batucantada Collective in Pelotas, Brazil. It articulates bodily, musical, and narrative knowledge experienced by the women, the researcher, and her Others — as a bateria leader, apprentice, percussionist, and Black woman in a process of creation and writing (AMORIM, 2004). The research unfolds through a reflexive engagement with the relationship these women establish with percussion and the drum. The drum skin is presented as a medium for reflection, and the structure of the text is organized by the circularity of the roda (circle) — breaking with linearity and embracing a fragmentary composition inspired by the philosophy of presentation (Darstellung), as proposed by Benjamin (1984). The text develops in four toques (drumbeats), each pointing to a dimension of the research: writing as fragment and montage; the grammar of drums and its relation to the body; the presence of the orixás as forces that traverse the narrative; and the memory of women and drums as territories of resistance. The dissertation adopts a feminin e mode of writing — fluid, collective, and insurgent — according to Castello Branco (1991), challenging traditional academic forms through dialogue with Black epistemologies, orality, and diasporic knowledge, based on authors such as Rufino (2019, 2021), Simas (2018, 2024), and Bispo (2023). As a result, the research highlights the percussive roda as a space for the production of knowledge, belonging, and resistance, emphasizing the drum as a political and pedagogical tool capable of recovering silenced memories and expanding the possibilities of writing and listening in the field of education.