Literatura e Direitos Humanos: os monstros na obra de Charlaine Harris

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims at reflecting upon human rights through Charlaine Harris’ vampire literature, understood as an ethnographic experience. This is a study about the monstrous, the socially excluded and the violence that results from this exclusion. It is aboutus, who monstrualize and who are monstrualized ourselves – who exclude and who are excluded; a dynamics which is represented in the fictional spaces of the narratives chosen as the corpus of this study. The corpus of this research is composed by the three first volumes of Harris’ book series The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2000-2013). Her characters – vampires, werewolves, and other strange creatures – undergo forms of oppression and develop practices of resistance, which are indicative of historical experiences that allow for thinking upon the advances and setbacks regarding the struggle for civil rights/human rights in contemporaneity. The objective of this study is articulated with its thesis, which is to recognize the literary production that thematizes monsters as heterotopic spaces that function as representations (CHARTIER, 1990) of the contemporaneous. When Harris inserts her characters amid the social space and the daily life instituted in her narratives, she creates spaces of heterotopy, here understood as the creation of ‘other’ spaces, neither utopic nor real, which widen our gaze upon worlds (FOUCAULT, 2007). This doctoral thesis is methodologically based upon an interdisciplinary dialogue among history, literature, anthropology, and the theory of human rights. From this body of knowledge, we have adopted and built upon important concepts when analyzing the novels – concepts such as human/inhuman, colonization/decolonization, multiculturalism/multinaturalism, and identity/otherness. Accordingly, we have drawn theoretical and methodological reflections from works by scholars such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2015), James Clifford (2002), Giorgio Agamben (2007), Peter Pál Pelbart (2011), Júlio Jeha (2007), Luis Alberto Warat (2017), Rogério Pacheco Borges (2015), among others.