Grupo Afro Ganga Zumba: dança e canto de mulheres quilombolas como educação antirracista na Zona da Mata Mineira.

Abstract

This PhD dissertation is located in the theoretical, practical and political field of the intersections between education, culture and art with a view indicating perspectives of anti- racist educational practice. The starting point is the “artistic-cultural” practices of the quilombola (marron or palanquero) women from this particular community at Fátima’s neighborhood part of the city called Ponte Nova/MG. Epistemic and gendered racism as operators of colonialities create static, deracialized and folkloric narratives about quilombos, discrediting the female political-pedagogical agency and the black body singing and dancing as a producer, systematizer and disseminator of knowledge. Grupo Afro Ganga Zumba is inserted as a response to this epistemicide policy by being a sociocultural and educational entity founded in 1988 by black teenagers who has created an Afro dance group. For 34 years, the Group has been engaged in expanding spaces for social, cultural and political participation of the black and quilombola population of Minas Gerais. I present the thesis that the dance and singing carried out by quilombola women from the Afro Ganga Zumba Group are anti-racist educational practices. The analyzes move particularly from ethnography, from the black perspective of decoloniality and black feminism.