Performances culturais e interculturalidade: a poética da encruzilhada em três cidades da rota Atlântico-Cerrado

Abstract

This dissertation investigates cultural performances as alternative ways of narrating the collective imaginary, challenging colonial structures of culture and society. The research adopts the concept of crossroads (encruzilhada) (Martins, 1997) as a method-metaphor to understand intercultural dynamics in three Brazilian cities—Rio de Janeiro, Goiânia, and Cidade de Goiás—and their relationships with aesthetic resistance and urban space occupation, considering the historical context of these cities in the cultural formation of Brazil and their localities. Drawing from Performance Studies (Turner, 1982; Schechner, 2011; Bauman, 2012), social memory (Nora, 1993), and critical interculturality and coloniality (Walsh, 2009; Quijano, 2005; Maldonado-Torres, 2003), this study analyzes how artistic and cultural manifestations operate as epistemes to observe the city as a stage, in a practice of flânerie. It is understood that modernity has constructed a world-system (Mignolo, 2011) that marginalizes the social experiences of subalternized groups, and that movements of symbolic reoccupation of urban territories emerge, resignifying spaces and bodies through cultural resistance practices. This research employs a qualitative, autoethnographic approach (Damásio, 2020), discussing poetics as a methodological axis for recording experiences and observed narratives . It is argued that “crossroads points” function as spaces of symbolic dispute and negotiation, where new ways of being, knowing, and narrating are constructed. Thus, the notion of the "poetics of the crossroads" emerges as a conceptual framework for interpreting cultural crossings in these territories, highlighting performance as a tool of resistance and re-existence against coloniality, fostering the practice of alternative epistemologies