Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas
Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438498837

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
Author: Vanessa K Valdés
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781438498812

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
Author: G. Reginald Daniel
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature
ISBN: 9780271052472

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.

Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis
Author: Kenneth David Jackson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300180829

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.”

Diasporic Blackness

Diasporic Blackness
Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2017-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438465130

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.

Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis
Author: Mario Higa
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2022-12-06
Genre:
ISBN: 1855663627

A lively and accessible introduction to Machado de Assis and his work

I the Supreme

I the Supreme
Author: Augusto Roa Bastos
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525564691

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.

The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora

The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora
Author: Antonio Olliz Boyd
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 1604977043

Antonio Olliz Boyd is an emeritus professor of Latin American literature at Temple University. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS from Grorgetown University, and a BA from Long Island University. Dr. Olliz Boyd has published various essays on Afro Latino aesthetics in literature in volumes, such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers; Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon; Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity; Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays among others, as well as articles on Afro Latino literary criticism in various refereed journals. --Book Jacket.

Racialized Visions

Racialized Visions
Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438481055

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.