The seeds of Marielle Franco: Afrodiasporic agency at the online-offline nexus

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on our fieldwork with Rio de Janeiro favela activists and social movements, this paper looks into how Black female activists, during the COVID-19 pandemic, engaged with multimodal resources and practical sociolinguistic imaginations that yielded forms of agency within an unequal social matrix. While engaging with a critique of the liberal model of agency as the triumph of individual autonomy, this paper ethnographically looks to modes of agency that unfold at the online-offline nexus as a capacity to act that emerges from pain and suffering, within limits of the language that wounds, and in the context of surviving capitalist inequities. This modality of agency becomes visible in the mourning movement for Marielle Franco, a Black favela councilwoman brutally murdered in 2018. Ethnographically, we discuss the Afrodiasporic agency of mourners as ‘watering Marielle’s seeds’, that is, as expanding Marielle’s sociolinguistic imaginations of language diversity, access to semiotic resources, and Black Atlantic cooperation.