“Marielle, presente”: Metaleptic temporality and the enregisterment of hope in Rio de Janeiro

This article looks to the assassination of Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman from the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, to outline a principled metacomunicative action toward “hope.” Empirically, it unpacks features of the pragmatics of her discourse, along with that of mourners who knew her. We identify two main features in their discourse that point to the enregisterment of hope, i.e. to ways in which their communicative practices have been attuned to avoid despair by propelling an alternative indexing of time, authority, and forms of life. These features are as follows: metaleptic temporality, i.e. the reinsertion of Marielle's agentive time into the temporal universe of heroes; and papo reto , a translational and performative practice of scaling bureaucratic and economic talk into local registers. Finally, we point to the habituated and pedagogic dimension of this sociolinguistics of hope, in part responsible for the fractalization and performativity of the mourning movement.