Racial prosthesis and anti-racist prosthesis: the production of life in the Arizona/RN settlement and the limits of racialization

Abstract

Based on a review of the results of a master's thesis on the productive backyards of the Arizona settlement in the municipality of São Miguel do Gostoso/RN, it is clear that material aspects are transformed alongside processes of disrepair, violence, and the struggle for dignity and respect. In this article, we propose that the relationship of Black women in Arizona with materiality points to an understanding of race as a "discursive-biological-spatial" prosthesis: discursively constructed, attached to human biology, a producer of space, and subject to "de-prosthetization." In the daily struggle for life, the women's technical inventiveness and the pedagogies they learn from experiences of violence intertwine, transforming migration into permanence through the prosthetization of fruit trees in the backyards; thirst is transformed into abundance through the prosthetization of refrigerator-water reservoirs and gutters; and loneliness into solidarity among women, especially the elderly, through food production in the backyard. In this prosthetic relationship between body-object-territory, race seems to become, even if only momentarily, obsolete.