Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: PEDRO JOSÉ GARCIA DE MENEZES

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : PEDRO JOSÉ GARCIA DE MENEZES
DATE: 09/09/2026
TIME: 15:00
LOCAL: Online
TITLE:

AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF CHRONOS: Contested Temporalities in The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

KEY WORDS:

African Queer Literatures; Animist Realism; Chrononormativity; Akwaeke Emezi; The Death of Vivek Oji.

PAGES: 102
BIG AREA: Lingüística, Letras e Artes
AREA: Letras
SUBÁREA: Línguas Estrangeiras Modernas
SUMMARY:

In recent years, the global literary landscape has been marked by the growing circulation of Queer African Literatures, a heterogeneous body of works that reinscribes within the realm of the narratable sex-gender dissident existences historically subjected to criminalization, dehumanization, and social unintelligibility. Taking this emerging field as its horizon of inquiry, this dissertation begins from the distance between being seen and being recognized as fully human in order to investigate how the normative regulation of time participates in the production of intelligibility for queer existences. To this end, it analyzes The death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi (2020), with particular attention to the aesthetic-ideological construction of Vivek Oji, whose queerness is articulated with Ọdịnanị, the cosmoperceptual horizon of Igbo religiosity, and with the ancestral continuity of ịlọ ụwa that links the character to the grandmother Ahunna. The research asks how the confrontation between normative and animist temporalities destabilizes the effects of chrononormativity on the recognition of the character’s queerness and humanity. It hypothesizes that this confrontation constitutes an organizing principle of Vivek’s construction: on the one hand, familial, medical, Christian, and communal discourses seek to align the character’s body, gender, and existence with a linear, individualized, and finite life trajectory; on the other, the animist temporalities of Ọdịnanị inscribe Vivek within a relational mode of existence in which embodiment, ancestry, and spirituality remain inseparable. The theoretical framework brings Elizabeth Freeman’s (2010) notion of chrononormativity into dialogue with Rahul Rao’s (2020) reflections on the temporal displacements experienced by queer subjects in postcolonial contexts, Harry Garuba’s (2012) Animist Realism, and John S. Mbiti’s (1990) and Leda Maria Martins’s (2021) formulations on African and Afro-diasporic conceptions of time. These perspectives are further articulated with Mikhail Bakhtin’s (2015; 2018) theory of the novel, particularly through the concepts of ideological formation and chronotope. Methodologically, this is a qualitative, bibliographic, and exploratory study guided by the Dialogical Analysis of Literature. From this perspective, the novel is understood as an artistic-literary utterance whose architectonic unity is constituted through the inseparable articulation of content, material, and form. The analyses conducted thus far show that the animist temporalities associated with Ọdịnanị participate in Vivek’s aesthetic-ideological construction by inscribing the character’s existence within relations among body, ancestry, space, and time that prevent birth and death from functioning as absolute limits to the character’s trajectory.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1000286 - ORISON MARDEN BANDEIRA DE MELO JUNIOR
Externa ao Programa - 1674934 - TANIA MARIA DE ARAUJO LIMA - UFRNExterno à Instituição - RUAN NUNES SILVA - UESPI