Black maternity in Um defeito de cor: history, body and nationalism as literary issues

Author(s)

Fabiana Carneiro da Silva

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2017-12-08

Examining board members

Marcos Piason Natali; Eduardo de Assis Duarte; Ligia Fonseca Ferreira; Maria Nazareth Soares Fonseca; Maria Aparecida de Oliveira Lopes

• Advisor: Marcos Piason Natali

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the novel Um defeito de cor (2006), by Ana Maria Gonçalves, highlighting the formal aspects of the text and indicating how they trigger urgent problematizations for the literary criticism produced in Brazil. The aesthetic procedures with which first-person representation is carried out in the novel are conceived as a key to linking literature to historiographical narratives, especially those produced by the Social History of Slavery, showing how the work of Gonçalves uses the epistemic crossroads between fiction and reality. It is proposed, therefore, that the letter set forth in the work, through which the enunciation of an African mother is constructed, which relates her life trajectory, and in her the constrictions to the exercise of motherhood throughout the nineteenth century in Brazil and Africa, performs a black corporality, summoning the contemporary critique to realize the vizualization of the black body of its discursivity. As an unfolding of this proposition, the work contrasts the narrator Kehinde, elaborated from a complex narrative focus, to the stereotyped figure of the \"mammy\", present in the national literary canon. The symbolic mechanisms of the interdiction of the recognition of African ancestry in Brazil by the nationalist discourse are visible with this strategy, while at the same time reflecting on the possibilities of staging and disruption of this ideological construct by Gonçalves\' novel. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/20752-0 - From the slave ship to the contemporary novel: a reading of "um defeito de cor", by Ana Maria Gonçalves, as a challenge to Brazilian literary criticism
• Grantee: Fabiana Carneiro da Silva
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate