On Wednesday, February 19th, the students of POR354: Still They Rise, co-taught by Professor Pedro Meira Monteiro and Graduate Student Tatiane Rangel, welcomed the POR109 class, along with their professor, Luana Reis, for a special collaborative session.

The gathering began with Letícia Vieira da Silva, a student of POR354 from Smith College and who’s taking classes at Princeton this semester, presenting her insights on Lélia Gonzalez’s concept of “Amefricanidade” and its role in rethinking identity within Brazilian society. Letícia’s reflections set the stage for a broader discussion on Gonzalez’s work and its implications in the contemporary debate on race, gender and politics.

Following this, Professor Luana Reis led the class in an exploration of Gonzalez’s ideas, particularly focusing on the concept of the “quilombo” as a space of meetings and “encontros” (encounters) and confluences. Through music, poetry, and out-loud readings, Luana illustrated how different women—across time and space—meet, connect, and build community through their works. The class engaged with the writings of Jovina Souza, Beatriz Nascimento, Elizandra Souza, Audre Lorde, and Nikki Giovanni, as well as poetry by Luana herself, drawing connections between their voices, experiences, and shared themes of resistance and community.

To conclude, Luana proposed a creative writing exercise in which students and faculty imagined encounters between historical figures through poems, narratives, or reflections. The responses were diverse and imaginative: one student envisioned a conversation between Jimi Hendrix and Caetano Veloso, while Terra Johari, a visiting PhD student from Brazil, explored the connections between queens of the ballroom culture, concluding her reading with a celebratory “dip”. Professor Tati wrote a poem on what an exchange between Carolina Maria de Jesus, Conceição Evaristo and Nikki Giovanni might have looked like, while another student imagined an encounter between Clarice Lispector and her own character Macabéa. Professor Luis Gonçalves, who also joined the class, crafted a dialogue between two significant women in his life, bridging different centuries, and Professor Pedro imagined Virginia Woolf meeting Luana Reis, where Luana introduced Woolf to the concept of quilombos as a reimagined “room of one’s own.”

Through these encounters, students and faculty engaged in a collective exploration of history, identity, and resistance, reaffirming how literature, art, and music can open new pathways to knowledge and community. Tati, Pedro and Luana are now planning to foster a new meeting of the two classes at the end of the semester, thus showing how the barrier between “language” and “content” courses can be easily broken, whenever creativity and free expression come to the forefront of the pedagogical process.