O “entre-lugar” de Silviano Santiago em uma leitura decolonial de Corações Migrantes, de Marise Condé

Abstract

The novel Migrant hearts (2002), by writer Maryse Condé, is examined here as a literary space in which questions of identity, displacement, and colonial legacies are not merely represented, but actively reworked through narrative form. Engaging with Silviano Santiago’s reflections in “Uma literatura nos trópicos,” this article develops an interpretation of the novel grounded in the tensions that shape decolonial writing. Central to this reading is Santiago’s notion of the “in-between space”, understood not as a position of indecision, but as a critical site from which dominant literary models are appropriated and displaced. Condé’s use of forms historically associated with the colonizer has often been approached with suspicion, interpreted as a sign of derivation or insufficient rupture. Rather than dismissing these concerns, this article revisits them in critical conversation with Santiago’s theoretical propositions and with decolonial thought, arguing that such formal appropriation operates as a conscious and productive strategy. From this perspective, Migrant hearts inscribes itself within the entre-lugar as a space of symbolic resistance, where inherited forms are neither passively reproduced nor simply rejected, but critically reconfigured.