Capão pecado e Via Ápia: interfaces da crítica social e do teor testemunhal na literatura marginal-periférica

Abstract

Marginal-peripheral literature, as an aesthetic expression focused on the representation of the peripheries, constitutes a space for contestation. Within this framework, this thesis, by analyzing the novels Capão pecado (Ferréz, 2000) and Via Ápia (Geovani Martins, 2022), argues that such narratives enable a critical reading of contemporary coloniality by highlighting themes such as racism, poverty, precarious labor, and state-administered violence. This research investigates the persistence and rearticulation of colonial structures in Brazilian social formation, demonstrating how these elements were not overcome by the transition to capitalism, but were adapted to the logic of accumulation and social control. The legacy of slavery and racial hierarchy was perpetuated in new forms of exploitation, deepening the links between racialization, exclusion, and precarity within this economic model. Such dynamics, naturalized in the social imaginary, manifests itself both in material inequality and in both symbolic and knowledge domains. Grounded in a social-critical perspective, the analysis articulates literary content and historical conditions, mobilizing theorists such as Aníbal Quijano (coloniality of power), Slavoj Žižek (repetition as farce), and Achille Mbembe (necropolitics). It argues that Brazil reenacts colonial traits—such as the racialization of labor and the criminalization of poverty—adapted to the demands of peripheral capitalism. This thesis, organized into five chapters, explores interconnected dimensions: it distinguishes contemporary marginal-peripheral literature from the marginal poetry of the 1970s; it analyzes the selected works from the perspective of literary testimony, as they denounce the historical trauma of colonization; it examines labor as an axis of racialized exclusion; and it deciphers direct violence as a manifestation of structural violence, articulated with necropolitics. It concludes by stating that these works transcend social denunciation, configuring themselves as aesthetic elaborations of a structural malaise. Its power lies in the literary formalization of the concrete experience of oppression, revealing the Brazilian tragedy masked by discourses of progress.