- 360 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Only available on web
About This Book
The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giantsâMachado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil's most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as "the poet of the slaves"; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os SertĂ”es (The Backlands), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery.
Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe and North America, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure. He ends by setting up a wider literary context for his core authors by introducing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors LuĂs Gonzaga Pinto da Gama and Joaquim Nabuco. The Black Butterfly is a revolutionary text that insists Brazilian culture has always refused a clean break between slavery and its aftermath. Brazilian slavery thus emerges as a living legacy subject to continual renegotiation and reinvention.
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1. Castro Alves, O Navio Negreiro, and a New Poetics of the Middle Passage
- 2. Castro Alves, Voices of Africa, and the Paulo Afonso Falls: From Afro-Brazilian Monologic Propopeia to Brazilian Plantation Anti-Pastoral
- 3. Obscure Agency: Machado de Assis Framing Black Servitudes
- 4. âThe child is father to the manâ: Bad Big Daddy and the Dilemmas of Planter Patriarchy in MemĂłrias PĂłstumas de BrĂĄs Cubas
- 5. Magnifying Signifying Silence: Afro-Brazilians and Slavery in Euclides da Cunha, Os SertÔes
- 6. After-Words and After-Worlds: Freyre, Llosa, Slavery, and the Cultural Inheritance of Os SertÔes
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index