The terrible everyday beauty of black drama: a reading with and against the archive of slavery about the diaries of Lima Barreto and Carolina Maria de Jesus

Author(s)

Fernanda Silva e Sousa

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2023-11-30

Examining board members

Marcos Piason Natali; Fabiana Carneiro da Silva; Jorge Augusto de Jesus Silva; Mario Augusto Medeiros da Silva

• Advisor: Marcos Piason Natali

Abstract

This dissertation aims to contribute to the shaping of a literary theory and a comparative literature in dialogue with the archive of slavery, recognizing its effects and limits and the possibilities for reading, analyzing and interpreting literary texts by black authors. Defending the need for an ethics of care in response to anti-black violence that is based on speculative literary criticism, I imagine and reflect on what is not in the texts, but can be thought of from it, as Saidiya Hartman proposes in relation to the archive of slavery. The research is based on the reading of Diário íntimo and Diário do hospício, by Lima Barreto, and Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada and Casa de Alvenaria: diário de uma ex-favelada, by Carolina Maria de Jesus. By assuming the experience of being black as the axis of these writings and, consequently, the impossibility of talking about this experience without approaching the past of slavery, the diaries are situated in an Afrodiasporic literary and intellectual tradition that challenges the boundaries between slavery and freedom, life and art, narrative and experience In this process, the song Negro drama, by Racionais MCs, released on the album Nada como um dia após o outro dia, is the theoretical tool for think about the category black drama, seen both as the lived experience of black people and as the different ways of narrating this experience, bringing together testimonies from enslaved, free and liberated people, songs by black Brazilian artists and literary texts by black authors, especially Amada, by Toni Morrison. Considering the song Negro drama as a narrative crossed by ambivalences, tensions and dilemmas that shape the existential condition of the black people, Lima Barreto and Carolina Maria de Jesus are understood as part of a huge collective of black men and women who fought for right to life in all its dimensions. In that sense, the desires, challenges and dreams that appear in the diaries can be expanded through connection with other ways of narrating the black drama, which become the ground of a survival that involves claiming and experimenting beauty in everyday life in the midst of a an experience of terror. In a reading with and against the slavery archive, Lima Barreto and Carolina Maria de Jesus emerge as two survivors of racial violence who narrated in their diaries, in a minor tone and in the private sphere, the terrible beauty of the black drama that the Racionais MCs were able to scream, at the top of your lungs, in 2002, echoing the voices of those who resisted and those who did not survive (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 19/22203-7 - Feel the black drama, go ahead and try to be happy: the ambivalences of the black drama in the diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lima Barreto
• Grantee: Fernanda Silva e Sousa
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)