Corpovivências in confronting coloniality: unfoldings of the construct in Critical Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Since the European invasion of Abya Yala, still at the end of the fifteenth century, the racial, onto-epistemological, and linguistic supremacy of the white, cisheterosexual, patriarchal, European, and Christian man has been widely disseminated as the single and necessary representation of the modern subject. Challenging this logic, I proposed in my doctoral dissertation (Almeida, 2023) the reinsertion of non-white, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-cisheteronormative bodies as central elements in identifying, questioning, and interrupting the many forms of erasure and silencing produced by coloniality – what I dared to call decolonial corpovivências. In this text, I discuss how the concept of corpovivências has been consolidated as a strategy to confront coloniality and its multiple dimensions, both inside and outside the English language classroom. In order to do it, I draw on the works of researchers situated within the field of Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL) who have drawn on this construct. Informed by the corpovivências of non-academic Black women, and by the corpovivências of people who are present, in one way or another, in academic discussions across different fields of
knowledge, I have reflected on my privileges as a white cis gay man and recognized the urgency of investing in praxiologies that articulate body, subjectivity, writing, lived experience, resistance, and re-existence in language classes. After all, more than reinforcing language as a neutral, apolitical entity with merely communicative purposes, I have come to understand my role as one of learning from people’s corpovivências who, through language, perform multiple resistances, create meanings, and reimagine wor(l)ds.