XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Emancipation and Fiction: the Depiction of Black People in Post Abolition of Slavery society in Memorial de Aires, Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha e Torto Arado

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class in Brazilian Literature II

Abstract

Machado de Assis' last novel, Memorial de Aires, takes place between 1888 and 1889, against the backdrop of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Despite little mention of black people in the narrative, the end of slave labor is of fundamental importance for the development of the plot. In the novel, Machado de Assis presents a critical, but subtle, perspective of the situation of newly emancipated ex-slaves in Brazil, a view marked by a skeptical tone in relation to the change underway. This paper places Machado de Assis’s final novel in conversation with two works that more explicitly depict the lives of black people in post-abolition Brazil: Recordações do Escrivão Isaias Caminha, a debut narrative by Lima Barreto that critically portrays the situation of black people during the first decades Brazil’s republic; and Torto Arado, a novel published in 2018, whose drama offers a critical view of the permanence of the effects of slavery in the 21st century. I demonstrate how fictional narratives about black people refer to a crucial question in Brazilian history: how has slavery shaped Afro-Brazilian experiences—through continuities and transformations—over time? Drawing on the theorists Sidney Chalhoub, Eduardo de Assis Duarte, and others, the aim of this work is to demonstrate the existence of a critical tradition in Afro-Brazilian literature that seeks to answer historical questions arising from a past and present marked by slavery.

Author

• Harion Custodio, Harvard University Visiting Researcher