Panel Discussion

Gillian McGillivray will be speaking about the value of using novels as primary sources to give students insights into Brazilian workers’ experiences. In particular, she will cite the examples of Patricia Galvão’s 1930s novel, translated and published in English as Industrial Park: A Proletarian Novel, and José Lins do Rego’s 1930s novel, translated and published in English as Plantation Boy. These books plunge student readers into the intersectional experiences of workers and working-class communities in urban São Paulo and in Brazil's sugar-zone of the rural Northeast. After preparing students with lectures and secondary readings about post-emancipation conditions and race, immigration and ethnicity, and the changing gender and generational norms related to early-twentieth-century urbanization and industrialization, the novels give students the opportunity to explore these themes through interaction among a rich ensemble of fictional characters. Whereas many secondary sources place emphasis on one variable e.g. race, or ethnicity, or gender, or generational change, the novels allow students to read about working class communities that reveal all of these themes, meeting characters who are daughters, wives, mothers, nephews, uncles, bosses, lovers, friends, and work comrades negotiating racial, ethnic, gendered, and generational hierarchies. What makes these novels particularly rich, is that they allow us to point students’ attention to prostitution and reproductive labor as forms of work, and to class, race, and gendered language and norms in working class communities. Hopefully during the Q&A after the roundtable, participants can share examples of other Latin American novels (testimonies, and other literary formats) that work well in the classroom.