The recent murder of Marielle Franco (1979-2018), an Afro-Brazilian politician and human rights activist, brought to light the vulnerability of most African descendants on Brazilian soil even when they climb up the social ladder. However, following in a social protest tradition which stretches back to Maria Firmina dos Reis, Afro-Brazilian intelligentsia has denounced the continuous killing of young blacks in the country as “genocide”. Abdias do Nascimento firstly used the term in the 1970s to expose and strongly criticize the structural racism underlying the fallacious notion of harmonious coexistence between slave masters and enslaved people in Brazil.
Contemporary Afro-Brazilian writers’ achievement speaks to the vitality of a literary tradition that historically has received little domestic critical attention. In the twentieth century, it was the work of non-Brazilian scholars such as Roger Bastide, Raymond Sayers, Gregory Rabassa and David Brookshaw that foregrounded the legitimacy of Afro-Brazilian literary production. Currently, the growing national and international recognition of Afro-Brazilian texts is attested by the groundbreaking scholarship of leading literary scholars interested in that literature, including Eduardo de Assis Duarte, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Zilá Bernd, Carole Boyce Davies, Niyi Afolabi, Dawn Duke, among others.
To contribute to the emerging body of criticism on Afro-Brazilian literature, we have selected four panelists from institutions in the US and Brazil who will subject the work of Afro-Brazilian writers to scrutiny. In so doing, the papers on this panel will address sociopolitical problems pertaining to Afro-Brazilians in the intersection of literature and present-day social issues.
In “Black Lives Matter in Brazil: Cidinha da Silva’s #Parem de nos matar”, Eliseo Jacob analyzes how black genocide in Brazil raises questions regarding the role of citizenship for historically marginalized Black populations. Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, or the physical and social death of the Black body, is used to frame the literary analyses. Jacob suggests that Afro-Brazilian literature centers around the question of the social, cultural and political value of Afro-Brazilians in contemporary society, which opens up discussions on the possibility of political mobilization and social empowerment in the face of state violence and repression.
Emanuelle K. F. Oliveira-Monte, in “The Right to the (Real and Imagined) City: Citizenship, Black Motion, and Metafiction in Paulo Dutra’s Aversão Oficial”, examines how contemporary Brazilian literary productions claim the underclass’ right to the city throughout the characters’ physical dislocations. Drawing from Brazilian contemporary texts that claim the right to citizenship through movement, Oliveira-Monte discusses how poor Afro-Brazilians reject guettoization and mark their physical, social, and cultural presence in urban spaces. The critic concludes that the spaces and characters emerge at the same time as real and imaginary, in a text that paradoxically calls upon reality while denying it.
In “History and Identity in the Works of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Female Writers”, Danielle de Luna e Silva discusses how history and identity are interconnected in the most recent novels published by Afro-Brazilian women writers. Silva argues that the literary texts revise Afro-Brazilian history through the eyes of female characters. By appraising what she considers contemporary slave narratives, Silva reveals new perspectives on the history of Africans and Afro-Brazilians, foregrounding the exploitation of the black female body, racism, and social injustice. Additionally, it is argued that the African cosmology embedded in Afro-Brazilian literature provides a new framework for understanding the experience of Black people in Brazil today.
Finally, Felipe Fanuel Rodrigues in “Poetry and the Quest for Power in Afro-Brazil” analyzes how contemporary Afro-Brazilian women poets such as Lívia Natália and Cristiane Sobral employ poetry as a means to fight against racism, religious intolerance and black genocide in Brazil today. In his critical analyses of Natália and Sobral’s selected poems, Rodrigues emphasizes to which extent their powerful poetic discourse defies the history of epistemic and physical violence at the same time that recreates the personal and collective identities of Afro-Brazilians. By deploying poetry as a strategy to affirm their social agency, Afro-Brazilian women poets articulate their subjectivity in the quest for attaining political power and redressing forms of dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and essentialism.
These four papers will promote a better understanding of multiple leitmotifs and issues concerning Afro-Brazilian literary production. Specifically, they will examine the possibilities for interpretations surrounding Afro-Brazilians’ current social status and how artistic production depicts their idiosyncrasies.