Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438498837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438498837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis PDF Author: Kenneth David Jackson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300180829
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell's seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he's funny as hell.”

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas PDF Author: Vanessa K Valdés
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438498812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

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

Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis PDF Author: G. Reginald Daniel
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271052472
Category : Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines how racial identity and race relations are expressed in the writings of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), Brazil's foremost author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Diasporic Blackness

Diasporic Blackness PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438465130
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg through the lens of both Blackness and latinidad. A Black Puerto Rican–born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder. While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg’s life suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.

Let Spirit Speak!

Let Spirit Speak! PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438442173
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interdisciplinary celebration of the cultural contributions of members of the African Diaspora in the Western hemisphere.

Racialized Visions

Racialized Visions PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438481055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
As a Francophone nation, Haiti is seldom studied in conjunction with its Spanish-speaking Caribbean neighbors. Racialized Visions challenges the notion that linguistic difference has kept the populations of these countries apart, instead highlighting ongoing exchanges between their writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering Haiti in this conversation also makes explicit the role that race—and, more specifically, anti-blackness—has played both in the region and in academic studies of it. Following the Revolution and Independence in 1804, Haiti was conflated with blackness. Spanish colonial powers used racist representations of Haiti to threaten their holdings in the Atlantic Ocean. In the years since, white elites in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico upheld Haiti as a symbol of barbarism and savagery. Racialized Visions powerfully refutes this symbolism. Across twelve essays, contributors demonstrate how cultural producers in these countries have resignified Haiti to mean liberation. An introduction and conclusion by the editor, Vanessa K. Valdés, as well as foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy, provide valuable historical context and an overview of Afro-Latinx studies and its futures.

I the Supreme

I the Supreme PDF Author: Augusto Roa Bastos
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525564691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
I the Supreme imagines a dialogue between the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator known as Dr. Francia and Policarpo Patiño, his secretary and only companion. The opening pages present a sign that they had found nailed to the wall of a cathedral, purportedly written by Dr. Francia himself and ordering the execution of all of his servants upon his death. This sign is quickly revealed to be a forgery, which takes leader and secretary into a larger discussion about the nature of truth: “In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie.” Their conversation broadens into an epic journey of the mind, stretching across the colonial history of their nation, filled with surrealist imagery, labyrinthine turns, and footnotes supplied by a mysterious “compiler.” A towering achievement from a foundational author of modern Latin American literature, I the Supreme is a darkly comic, deeply moving meditation on power and its abuse—and on the role of language in making and unmaking whole worlds.

Precarious Liberation

Precarious Liberation PDF Author: Franco Barchiesi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438436122
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the 2012 CLR James Award presented by the Working Class Studies Association Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government's definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state's normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa's democratic experiment.

Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing

Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing PDF Author: Kathryn M. Mayers
Publisher: Government Institutes
ISBN: 1611483921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book Here

Book Description
The process of shaping cultural identity in colonial Spanish America has occurred as much through the medium of pictures as through the medium of writing. Focused on writing that references visual texts (ekphrasis), Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing examined the way words about pictures in the writing of three Spanish American Creoles negotiate the challenges that confronted the ruling elite in Spanish America during the contentious period between the Conquest and Independence.