Antologia Cansanção: atiçar de peles

Abstract

The anthology Cansanção: A Stirring of Skins is a work that brings together diverse and insurgent voices, with texts interwoven in poetics and reflections that traverse spiritualities, memories, and bodies in constant reconfiguration. As its title suggests, the "cansanção"—a plant known for its stinging touch—is both metaphor and method for achieving what this work sets out to do: to stir skins and rethink how correlations between Art and the University have been woven. Thus, this collection seeks to provoke, stimulate, and open pathways of thought that incite sensitivities and affections, especially those neglected by a Western rationality that has historically silenced ancestral voices. The texts that make up this work manifest and converge in various formats—essays, poetry, memoirs, and articles—intertwining in their desire to build bridges between the body and writing. In these diverse attempts to crystallize the ideas coursing through their bodies, each author constructs a reflection that not only communicates concepts but inhabits the realm of lived experience, proposing epistemological crossings rooted in memories inscribed in the skin.

In the text-visual-poetic-performance piece AGÔ IS THE INITIAL ACTION FOR AN ANCESTRAL ENCOUNTER, Vaguiner Bráz invites us into a mindful dive: the request for permission (agô) becomes the necessary ritual to awaken memories, connect with ancestors, and provoke timeless questions. In harmony with this, Andeson Cleomar dos Santos, in THE CANSANÇÃO PANKARARU: A SACRED PLANT THAT PURIFIES THE BODY AND SPIRIT OF THE PANKARARU INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, highlights the ancestral value of the cansanção and the imbu race ritual as purifying and symbolic elements for his Pankararu people, reminding us of the Indigenous wisdom that sees body and spirit as a unity in constant dialogue with a dancing nature.

Marilza Oliveira da Silva, in turn, presents CorpOrixá: Foundations for Dances of Ancestral Poetics and, in the artistic-educational proposal POETIC DANCES OF OSSAIN, an Afrocentric pedagogy that intertwines body, spirituality, and movement. Here, dance becomes a technology of resistance and reconnection with the sacred, shaping new possibilities for critical and poetic education. Meanwhile, Dani de Iracema, in Self-Portrait as Poetic Archive and Writing of the Self, challenges us to rethink the self-portrait as a living archive—a writing of the body that carries memory and re-signifies personal experience into an act of creation.

STUDIES ON CANSANÇÃO: DECOLONIAL FETISHISM, by William Gomes, offers a critical approach to image regimes and power relations, proposing a reading that exposes colonialist strategies and perceptions, challenging us to reconstruct modes of affirmation. Thiago Santos de Assis, in Memories of Formation: Traversing the Labyrinths of Self-Compositions, navigates the winding paths of memory and personal transformation, reflecting on the act of (re)composing oneself through self-narratives and the counterflow of social denials of the Black body.

Closing the collection with wisdom from life/the streets, Danilo Jamal, in his Poestos, creates intersections between poetry and manifesto, blending words and meanings that reverberate urgent questions about identity and belonging. His texts challenge us to inhabit this frontier space between poetry and political action, where words have the power to alert, ignite, and transform.

This e-book is part of the project Cansanção: Decolonial Fetishism, supported by the UFBA Extension Office through the Postgraduate Extension Support Call. Recognizing the extensionist nature of the proposal, William invited contributors from both within and outside the university to intersect the themes central to his doctoral research, supervised by Thiago Assis. These connections have formed over time—some through prior provocations and collaborative creations (Vaguiner and Dani), others as theoretical references directly engaging with the book’s central themes (Andeson and Marilza), and others through insurgent narratives that confront colonial and institutional systems (Jamal).

Thus, Cansanção: A Stirring of Skins is an invitation to engage with new epistemologies and forgotten knowledge—those that modernity sought to erase but persist in burning like embers, like nettles, in the bodies and stories that shape this work. With each page, the anthology proposes a journey through the memories and experiences we carry under our skin—and, like the touch of cansanção, awakens in us the courage to resist, create, and continue—sometimes as healing, sometimes as creation.