English
The Amefrican Women Project – Americas and Caribbean aims to investigate, record, and disseminate the historical, social, cultural, political, and religious trajectories of Amefrican women across the Americas and the Caribbean. Its central product is the creation of 27 biographical dictionaries—one for each Brazilian state—each documenting the lives of up to 100 Amefrican women, respecting regional specificities and the diverse experiences of Black women in their territories. Additionally, we plan to organize an international Biographical Dictionary of Amefrican Women, including biographies from across the Americas and the Caribbean.
This is a collective, interdisciplinary initiative with national and international reach, dedicated to valuing the memories, knowledge, and Afro-diasporic protagonism historically invisibilized by Eurocentric canons of knowledge production. The proposal articulates historical, sociological, and cultural research with participatory and counter-colonial methodologies, mobilizing researchers, community intellectuals, educators, social movement leaders, women from terreiros (traditional Afro-Brazilian religious spaces), quilombolas, and local collectives.
More than a record of individual paths, the project seeks to build a collective memory, understanding biographies as political devices for recognition, belonging, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. The dictionary thus asserts itself as an instrument for contesting historical narratives, strengthening identity, and expanding public access to the histories of Amefrican women.
The initiative is conceived and coordinated by Thaís Alves Marinho within the Graduate Program in History at PUC Goiás, in coordination with the Kilombo Áyàn Research Group – Social Memory and Transatlantic Subjectivities (CNPq/PUC Goiás) and the Latin American and Caribbean Network on Terreiro Feminisms (RELFET). The project also receives logistical support from Maria Edimaci Teixeira Leite, vice-leader of the research group.
The project is developed with the institutional support of FLUP – Literary Festival of the Peripheries, the Goiás State Research Foundation (FAPEG), and funding from CNPq and CAPES. The proposal was publicly presented during the 1st Literary Festival of Racial Equality (FLIIR), an initiative funded by the Ministry of Racial Equality and CNPq, scheduled for November 2025.
Our guiding commitment is ethical, political, and epistemological: to confront historical erasures, highlight practices of resistance, and create conditions so that different voices can write together the history of Black women in their plurality, complexity, and historical agency. In this sense, the Biographical Dictionary of Amefrican Women is not just a reference work, but a living space of memory, struggle, and ancestry, continuously renewed with each biography produced and shared.
Instruction: Information on how to participate is available in English, Spanish, and French. Simply access the "How to Participate" section.