Discussing these topics and their literary and cultural manifestations is especially pertinent now given the rise of the far-right in Brazil, the reckoning with antiblack racism and racial violence, and the heightened impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on Indigenous peoples and favela communities that have made Brazil’s underlying racial and socioeconomic disparities even more apparent. The presentations and subsequent discussion correspond to recent scholarly trends of drawing greater attention to historically underrepresented voices within Brazilian literature and culture, as exemplified by the work of, among others, Emanuelle Oliveira, Leila Lehnen, and Sônia Roncador, and of rereading canonical figures and texts in new lights that emphasize their Amerindian and African influences, as seen in studies by Marcus Wood, G. Reginald Daniel, and Tracy Devine Guzmán. The scholars participating in this session will add their voices to this scholarship with readings that underscore the critical role of Afro-Brazilians, Indigenous peoples, and women in writing and making the nation. The session will consist of four panelists who will present for twelve to fourteen minutes each, which will allow for brief introductions of the topic and the individual papers, and at least fifteen minutes of open discussion between panelists and audience members.
The panel will begin with Leonardo de Oliveira Silva’s “O herói negro na poesia da Guerra da Tríplice Aliança: Marcílio Dias em Riachuelo,” which examines the representation in Luiz José Pereira da Silva’s epic poem of Marcílio Dias as a Black hero of the War of the Triple Alliance. His analysis of the poem’s formal features highlights the shifting position of Blacks in Brazil in connection to abolitionist discourses during the mid-nineteenth century. With “Doomed Nation: Dead Children and Race in Brazilian Short Narratives,” Carolina Rodríguez Tsouroukdissian continues this interrogation of race in Brazilian literature with readings of early-twentieth-century narratives featuring dead, mostly Afro-descendant, children. Using a postcolonial framework, she focuses on how Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s “Os porcos” and Monteiro Lobato’s “Negrinha” expressed concern with the lack of opportunities for non-white Brazilians and revealed a pessimistic outlook for the future of an oligarchic nation that excluded large segments of the population.
Paulo Moreira’s “Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo and Brazilian Indigenous Peoples Today” draws our attention to another marginalized population, Indigenous Brazilians, as he differentiates Caio Prado Júnior’s seemingly more leftist Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo (1942) from other seminal essays of the period: Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-grande & Senzala and Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda’s Raízes do Brasil. His analysis of Prado’s essay aims to understand the limits of progressive, nationalist developmentalism when it comes to Indigenous Peoples’ rights and environmental protection today. To end the session, André Natã Mello Botton’s “A History of Marginal Brazilian Literature from the Peripheries” offers a more expansive understanding of marginality in Brazilian literature. He constructs a history of these texts as constituting a new literary field beginning with the early- to mid-twentieth-century works of Lima Barreto and Carolina Maria de Jesus, and continuing through the contemporary contributions of Férrez and Paulo Lins. Collectively, these papers will allow us to think through the meanings, contradictions, and unrealized potential of Brazil as an independent nation.