(Miscege)nación en O Cortiço

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2013-03-19 20:47Z by Steven

(Miscege)nación en O Cortiço

Trans: Revue de Littérature Générale et Comparée
Issue 5 (2008)
10 pages (24 paragraphs)

Brian L. Price, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Wake Forest University

Written a year after the proclamation of Brazilian independence, O Cortiço by Aluisio Azevedo depicts the demographic composition of the country with a naturalistic sense of detail and examines the possible dangers of miscegenation in the new republic. Influenced by racist European theories, Azevedo and his contemporaries feared that the mixing of races would eventually result in diluting the European ancestries which had to be the base of the new society. In the novel, the cortiço—a kind of small proletarian town which abounded in the 19th century—works as a laboratory where the different racial elements converge, entangle and destroy each other. The present essay examines the historical context during which that novel was written and its critical eye focuses on the two main love affairs. In both, a European man marries (has a love relationship with) a woman of inferior race and pays a high moral price for that. In both, the man loses the purity which the author expects from the new nation. Eventually contrary to what Azevedo expected, mixed-race Brazil triumphs over the European colony and turns into a cortiço.

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