Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil.
Although Brazil is the largest Afro-descendant country outside of Africa, the literature produced by Black Brazilians is mostly unknown both in Brazil and abroad. There is a growing worldwide demand for Afro-descendant literature and a demand for decolonial practices and content, especially within Lusophone literature and literature across the Americas. Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction emerges from a UCL-sponsored collaborative translation project, bridging Afro-Brazilian literature with a global audience to respond to the worldwide call for Afro-diasporic narratives. This unique compilation of 21 short stories includes both established and emerging Afro-Brazilian voices. The anthology is bilingual, fostering cross-cultural understanding and affirming the legitimacy of pretoguês as a literary language. The texts are presented with three insightful contributions by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (UCL), Julio Ludemir (Flup) and Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro (UERJ). The introductions not only contextualise the short stories, but also engage in theoretical debates, shedding light on the role of literary translation in language teaching and the impact of the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (Flup) in forming a new generation of Black Brazilian writers. Praise for Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction ‘Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction highlights generational voices spanning from the Quilombhoje literary movement to newly published authors. This bilingual anthology promises to be an asset to the ever-growing Afro-Brazilian literary canon. The gift to scholars and enthusiasts of Afro-Diaspora literature is the access to brilliantly rich creative works.’ Antonio D. Tillis, Rutgers University-Camden ‘This collection showcases the most compelling Black prose penned in contemporary Brazil bringing together a remarkable convergence of generations in a bilingual anthology. Each story is imbued with Black consciousness, transformed into the art of words, offering a powerful portrayal of both present-day and historical Brazil.’ Eduardo de Assis Duarte, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Set in the early years of the Old Republic after the abolition of slavery, Júlia Lopes de Almeida's The Bankruptcy depicts the rise and fall of a wealthy coffee exporter against a kaleidoscopic background of glamour, poverty, seduction, and financial speculation. The novel introduces readers to a turbulent period in Brazilian history seething with new ideas about democracy, women’s emancipation, and the role of religion in society. Originally published in 1901, its prescient critiques of financial capitalism and the patriarchal family remain relevant today. In her lifetime, Júlia Lopes de Almeida was compared to Machado de Assis, the most important Brazilian writer of the nineteenth century. She was also considered for the inaugural list of members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, but was excluded because of her gender. In the decades after her death, her work was largely forgotten. This publication, a winner of the English PEN award, marks the first novel-length translation of Almeida’s writing into English, including an Introduction to the novel and a Translators' Preface, and accompanies a general rediscovery of her extraordinary body of work in Brazil.
Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the “Black world” paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression. Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery’s afterlife—including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song—shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimarães’s novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage,” Kara Walker’s sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo. Kennon’s expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.
Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4
In the first volume of the MLA series World Literatures Reimagined, Earl E. Fitz examines the complex relation between Brazil and the United States: the colonial similarities and differences; the shared issues of slavery and racism; the mutual influences; and the political, economic, and cultural interactions, sometimes troubling, between the two nations. He also provides an extensive overview of Brazilian narrative, tracing its roots in both European and indigenous traditions, and of Brazilian literature in English translation.
Brazil’s Black population, one of the oldest and largest in the Americas, mobilized a vibrant antiracism movement from grassroots origins when the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s. Campaigning for political equality after centuries of deeply engrained racial hierarchies, African-descended groups have been working to unlock democratic spaces that were previously closed to them. Using the city of Salvador as a case study, Kwame Dixon tracks the emergence of Black civil society groups and their political projects: claiming new citizenship rights, testing new anti-discrimination and affirmative action measures, reclaiming rural and urban land, and increasing political representation. This book is one of the first to explore how Afro-Brazilians have influenced politics and democratic institutions in the contemporary period. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.
