{"id":58520,"date":"2019-07-16T01:44:48","date_gmt":"2019-07-16T01:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58520"},"modified":"2019-07-16T01:44:48","modified_gmt":"2019-07-16T01:44:48","slug":"in-brazil-a-new-rendering-of-a-literary-giant-makes-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58520","title":{"rendered":"In Brazil, a New Rendering of a Literary Giant Makes Waves"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Brazil, a New Rendering of a Literary Giant Makes Waves<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2019-06-14<\/p>\n

Shannon Sims<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"A<\/a>
\nA widely known image of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis<\/a>, left, that appears on his books, compared with the one that has gone viral on Brazilian social media in recent months, right.
\nLeft: Academia Brasileira de Letras<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Machado de Assis Real, developed by a Brazilian university and an ad agency, shows the 19th-century writer in color, challenging some long-held ideas about him in the process.<\/em><\/p>\n

RECIFE, Brazil<\/a> \u2014 Throughout elementary and middle school, Ricardo Pavan Martins remembers reading Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis<\/a>, one of Brazil\u2019s most famous writers.<\/p>\n

So the 29-year-old, who lives in Bauru<\/a>, was shocked to see a new image of Machado that has gone viral in the country. It shows him with chocolate-brown skin, considerably darker than how he appears in the black-and-white photograph that appears on virtually all of his books and hangs prominently in the Brazilian Academy of Letters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always imagined him as white because this is the default image of most writers,\u201d Martins said. \u201cI am certain that if the skin color of an author so important was at the very least discussed during my experience at school, my black friends would have felt more represented.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among Brazilian writers, Machado, who lived from 1839 to 1908, inhabits a unique position. \u201cDom Casmurro,\u201d his 1899 masterpiece about cuckoldry and jealousy, is required reading at some schools around the country. His name has been lent to streets and subway stops across Brazil. Susan Sontag<\/a> called him<\/a> \u201cthe greatest writer ever produced in Latin America,\u201d and others have compared him<\/a> to Flaubert, Kafka<\/a>, Henry James<\/a> and Alice Munro<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[\u201cThe Collected Stories of Machado de Assis<\/a>,\u201d one of the Times critics\u2019 top books of 2018, \u201creveals the arc of Machado\u2019s career, from the straightforward love stories to the cerebral and unpredictable later works.\u201d ]<\/p>\n

The traditional historical photo of him shows a man whose skin is nearly as light as his crisp white dress shirt. But a new project, developed by the S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a> office of the advertising agency Grey and S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s University Zumbi dos Palmares, a predominantly black university, re-creates that photo in a way that the project\u2019s leaders say more accurately reflects what Machado looked like.<\/p>\n

Machado was known to be the descendant of freed slaves, but the new rendering, which shows him as a black man, has shaken Brazilians, prompting some to reconsider how they previously read his work and angering others who feel his legacy had been whitewashed…<\/p>\n

…It isn\u2019t clear how or why Machado\u2019s image was lightened. Machado scholars like G. Reginald Daniel<\/a>, a sociology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said that in 19th-century Brazil, Machado’s publishers \u201cwould have totally wanted him white to sell. For people to see this great author as of African descent would have been very troubling for many.\u201d…<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was celebrated during a period of Brazilian society where to be recognized and valued you had to be white,\u201d Matos said. \u201cHe would have never been taken seriously, and never achieved commercial success, if people had known his true racial identity. He would have been a failure if he had been known as black.\u201d<\/p>\n

But some of those most familiar with Machado\u2019s life are ambivalent about the push to identify him as black. Daniel, who wrote a book exploring Machado\u2019s mixed-race identity<\/a>, said that while he commended the efforts to \u201cre-racialize\u201d him, \u201cthe real Machado de Assis was not a black man but mixed. Portraying him otherwise misses the duality and in-between experience he had as a biracial man.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Machado de Assis Real, developed by a Brazilian university and an ad agency, shows the 19th-century writer in color, challenging some long-held ideas about him in the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,83,21,459,1196],"tags":[30023,142,3781,8304,30024,2640,30022,30021,2327],"class_list":["post-58520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-history","category-literary-criticism","tag-adriano-matos","tag-g-reginald-daniel","tag-joaquim-maria-machado-de-assis","tag-machado-de-assis","tag-mayra-salles","tag-new-york-times","tag-ricardo-pavan-martins","tag-shannon-sims","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58522,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58520\/revisions\/58522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}