The Mythical, Political, and Poetic Crossroads: The Ethnographic Writing of Itamar Vieira Junior in Torto Arado

This article proposes a reflection on the literary writing of Itamar Vieira Júnior in the novel Torto Arado (2019), based on the concept of ethnographic writing and articulating contributions from Lélia Gonzalez (1984), Clifford Geertz (1989), Walter Benjamin (1994), Antonio Candido (2004; 2006), Braun (2012), Nesimi (2019), among other authors. The analysis focuses on the construction of a "diasporic literary phenomenon," in which mythology, politics, and poetry intersect within a narrative that translates the listening to racialized and territorialized bodies in the Brazilian hinterlands (sertão). The discussion is guided by the hypothesis that the textual construction represents a subjective-objective process in which the author acts as an ethno–translator. From this perspective, the crossroads is explored as a symbolic and epistemological category, and literature as a form of social mediation. The crossroads, in this sense, materializes the entanglement of multiple temporalities, identities, and knowledge systems present in the narrative, reinforcing the author's role as a mediator between the lived experience of sertão communities and their literary representation.