ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how subjects in Brazilian favelas build on indexicality, or particular modes of linking signs to their social worlds, to articulate alternative temporalities that are conducive to hope. This particular practice of languaging is a means of grappling with conditions of hopelessness predicated in regimes of violence and economic dispossession. We focus on Marielle Franco, a Black queer councilwoman from the favela who was elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro in 2016. An advocate for the socially and economically marginalized, Marielle was assassinated after just over a year in office, on 14 March 2018. Her political languaging is representative of a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. We explore Marielle’s production of hope via language, or what we refer to as the languaging of hope, and find that she contested an enduring indexical order in Brazil to challenge the temporal regiment of the political establishment premised on the exclusion of non-elites. We refer to the ensuing temporal imaginary produced by Marielle’s communicative praxis as transgressive temporality.
