Davi's Introduction

Teaching Woolf in contemporary Brazil has been helping me break windows from which to breathe. VW’s continuous attacks on the (patriarchal, capitalist and colonial) institutions have become an interest I share with my students, for whom I dedicate most of my hours nowadays. Woolf knew all too well that history is text and that writing is its production. As a writer, she never ceases to frame new modes of living in the world and being in language. When I invited my students to meet at my house for a discussion of Woolf’s novels in chronological order, this is what I had in mind: to live with Woolf’s words now, to engage with her in a contemporary conversation about gender, politics, and the effects of violence on our bodies and minds. These freewrites with Elisa record and expose these urgent conversations - both locally and globally. They record our mode of supporting one another, of listening to one another, in spite of the huge silence that governments want to impose on us as researchers, teachers, and bodies in the world.