Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was a legendary Afro-Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer, widely considered the greatest writer in Brazilian literature and one of the most important figures in the Portuguese language. Throughout the twentieth century his figure and works went through a process of whitening that helped shaping a way of understanding the society he depicts in his works that became dominant. Such a procedure has steadily been challenged for the past thirty years. This panel, “New Approaches to Machado de Assis II,” completes the guaranteed session “New Approaches to Machado de Assis.” The panel brings together perspectives that enriches the understanding of Machado de Assis’s interpretations, therefore shedding light on the complex nineteenth-century Brazil with the many social implications of slavery and the decay of the empire as a governing system. By doing so the panel revisits and aims at reshaping contemporary understandings of colonial legacies that remain central to the readings of Machado de Assis’s works.

Once this reappraisal of his race and race relations in his works ascended it opened several venues for other topics thus far rendered unimportant, frowned upon, or considered non-existent, such queerness, sexuality, geographic and political implications, among many more contemporary possibilities of examination. The rationale for organizing it arises from the current interest – demonstrated by the number of proposals received which prompted the proposal of a second panel – in revisiting the works of Machado de Assis in the wake of his recently reclaimed blackness which prompted a new mentality regarding the canonical approach he has received previously. In doing so, the panel opens new venues of interpretations that not only carry out the recognition of Machado de Assis as a Black author but also encourages the examination of other topics previously considered unimportant or absent from his ouvre. Furthermore, the panel addresses a gap in the scholarship by presenting interdisciplinary approaches that respond to current discussions about the place of nineteenth-century Brazilian Literature in the nation-building process that culminates in a country that institutionally denied blackness for almost a century and therefore created a national identity and way of thinking the nineteenth century that, as the presenters will show, Machado rejected in his works.

The speakers will have twelve to thirteen minutes to present their papers, which will allow for a discussion period of about fifteen minutes conducted by the presider. Such a strategy grants an equilibrium between scholarly presentation and open dialogue that stimulates intellectual exchange.

Collaborative presentation by José Luiz Passos and Shonni Enelow argues that one the most controversial of Machado de Assis’s novel, Dom Casmurroˆ, is best understood as a novel of theatrical absorption under racial pressure, thus challenging the long history of readings that disregard race as a main topic for the author. João G. Ladeia Viana’s paper “Machado's Pharmacy: a Psychotropology of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881)” centers the numerous scenes of consciousness alteration in the narrative as the culmination of a broader tendency to relativize pharmaceutical science and revelatory ecstasy in the author's body of work, therefore unveiling how the development of psychoactive alkaloids impacted society. Eviatar Oren will argue that imitation operates in multiple levels in the novel Quincas Borba – both as a literary technique and as a social practice characteristic of the Rio de Janeiro’s bourgeoisie in the 19th century, criticized by Machado. João Copertino proposes a historically grounded reading of the relationship between Machado’s psychology and melodrama to address Machado’s relationship to melodrama in relation to Brazilian literature and the operatic life of Rio de Janeiro. The four papers challenge stagnant ideas surrounding scholarship on Machado de Assis that historically overlooked the topics each presenter addresses. This is important because he is the most celebrated of Brazilian authors exactly because he depicts an alternative view of the complex social relations in a slave society.

Such a selection of panelists demonstrates how Machado de Assis’ work prompts a variety of voices, bringing together scholars at different career stages, as well as of interdisciplinary backgrounds. These four papers will promote a better understanding of multiple leitmotifs and issues concerning Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian literary production.