Black Body as Ontological Erasure

Racialized trajectories in the colonial grammar

Abstract

This essay posits the Black body as ontological erasure, whose lived experience rebels against the colonial grammar that reduces it to object or commodity. Through a theoretical-analytical methodology it examines the grammar of exclusion, where language functions as a technology of power that enforces whiteness as the norm and condemns Blackness to the “zone of non-being.” As a rupture of this norm, escrevivência (writing-living) emerges as an epistemic and political practice of re-existence, erasing dominant narratives to reinscribe Black existence as potency and articulate a pedagogy of insurgence. Finally, it discusses how Black quotidians appear in formative spaces, despite structural violence, challenging the educational and social logic that naturalizes inferiorization. Thus, the aim this essay is to demonstrate how erasure, far from being a flaw, is a fissure, opening pathways for a decolonized and plural grammar of the human, where Black insurgency, whether through the scream, writing, or daily life, redefines humanity beyond the limits of whiteness.