Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Vanessa K. Valdés, Earl E. Fitz, Vanessa K. Valdés, Earl E. Fitz

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781438498829, 9781438498812
• eBook ISBN: 9781438498836
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Literature

Examines the reception of Brazil's most-canonized writer in the United States to shed light on questions of Blackness and hemispheric American experience.

Considered a genius in his own lifetime, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is Brazil's most canonized writer. Yet, he remains a contested and even enigmatic figure to readers in Brazil and abroad, his relative silence on slavery leaving him vulnerable to charges of aspirations to whiteness. Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas reconsiders this issue by exploring how his prose fiction has been received in the United States. In seven original essays, contributors re-examine his novels and short stories, as well as photographs of the writer, in order to better understand the strategies he employed to navigate Brazil's literary scene as a man of African descent. Framed by a contextualizing introduction and an afterword in the form of a conversation between the editors, the volume speaks to and with our own historical moment and the realities of Black lives in the Americas over the course of the last two centuries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Complexities of Disguise: Machado de Assis and His Contemporary Moment
• Chapter One Machado de Assis in Brazil, the United States, and Greater America: A Writer, a Black Writer, Or … A Genius, Our Literary Pelé?
• Chapter Two Black, Then White, Then Black Again: Brazil’s Racial Politics and the Changing Face of Machado de Assis
• Chapter Three “Father against Mother”: Race and/in the Reception of the Works of Machado de Assis
• Chapter Four Raimundo the Obscure: Enslavement, Abolition, and the Problematics of “Uncle Tom” Agency in Machado’s Iaiá Garcia
• Chapter Five Machado de Assis and the Color of Brazilian Literature in the United States
• Chapter Six Black Writer, White Letters?: Machado’s Racialized Reception of Identity and Aesthetics
• Chapter Seven Outsiders Within and Insiders Without: Narrating Race and Identity in Machado de Assis, Milton Hatoum, and Jeferson Tenório1
• Afterword A Conversation between Friends
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover