About

Never Trust Sindarela is a book inhabited by the experiences and subjectivities of black women vendors of informal markets and leaders of popular associations of the cities of Dili and Maputo that disarticulate, word for word, the epic of Portuguese colonialism. It reveals rationalities that resisted it and re-imagined other maps of the world disobeying the thought that reduced them to cattle or pawn jewels in the wars of subjection that colonial cynicism called pacification campaigns. This book opens up analytical and critical spaces which allow us to understand the inventive forms of resistance and subversion of black women from Mozambique and East Timor who knew how to go through the times of Portuguese colonialism from within, which they could not escape, as well as, afterwards, the period of their liberation in which they could not always freely intervene. It is an essay that moves pluri-rationalities, multi-procedures, polycentres, which thickens and expands it, allowing us to identify in the voices and cultures of these black women from Timor and Mozambique the impact of Portuguese colonialism as the centre it was, as well as the margins it created. It makes possible the displacement, sometimes even the total inversion of the positions of centre and margin, showing how at various stages the centre became the periphery and the periphery the centre.
This periphery that is transmuted into centre carries out the necessary disjunction with the colonial era for which black lives, especially those of women, served no purpose other than to maintain the extreme logic of violence and dispossession. In this book, the lives of black bodies and subjectivities not only matter but also reveal the amazing strength of their subversion.