Afro-Brazilian Literature: Spaces Conquered, Spaces In-between

Abstract

razilian culture, that offspring of the Black Diaspora, established itself under the yoke of repressive violence, and managed to develop in spite of all the attempts to silence it, during the centuries of slavery and their aftermath. One of its ramifications is a literary form today discussed in academia as the Afro-Brazilian canon, born under circumstances of extreme social tension. It took a long time for this literature to grow in its written form, which was practically nonexistent in colonial times (Domingos Caldas Barbosa [1738-1800] may be seen as its precursor). Only in the course of the nineteenth century were Afro-Brazilian writings published-timidly, often under the cover of anonymity. The aim of this paper is to discuss some basic characteristics that Afro-Brazilian literature has delineated so far. For the present purposes, I consider as constitutive of the AfroBrazilian canon the totality of its written manifestations comprehending different epochs, gender differences, ideological beliefs, aesthetic options. It encompasses the work of a number of authors who, sharing a sense of belonging with their African ancestry, made the option to use and exert that life experience as a creative tool, in their elaboration of the cultural object. Such discourse exhibits the perspective of the black community victimized, first, by the submissive model imposed by the patriarchal slave order; and later, by the frustrating collapse of that order, since abolition of slavery in the country (1888) did not bring about equality but rather a second class citizenship for its immense black population (Brazil is the country with the second largest African-descendant population in the world). Ample as it is in its thematic scope, Afro-Brazilian literature cannot evade the monumental issues that permeated its creation. The African experience, in its roots and developments, moulds a discursive formation that is politically minded, underscores the question of race relations in a Latin-American nation and incorporates the past of slavery and of many diasporas in a complex, turbulent, often dubious present. It is made up of counter-discourses in relation to the dominant canon that arise as a writing back to colonialism and slavery, but it goes beyond the constraints imposed by the colonizer/colonized, master/slave paradigms. Today, it faces and interrogates neoand postcolonialism in their various forms in the world, the phenomenon of globalization, and the still predominant views of literature and its criticism as elitist practices, created by and for the happy few.