{"id":59439,"date":"2020-01-31T18:13:19","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T18:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59439"},"modified":"2020-01-31T18:13:19","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T18:13:19","slug":"the-black-butterfly-brazilian-slavery-and-the-literary-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59439","title":{"rendered":"The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

West Virginia University Press<\/a>
\nOctober 2019
\n360 pages
\nPaperback ISBN: 978-1-949199-03-1
\nCloth ISBN: 978-1-949199-02-4
\neBook ISBN: 978-1-949199-04-8<\/p>\n

Marcus Wood<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of English
\nUniversity of Sussex<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Black Butterfly<\/em> focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil\u2019s<\/a> literary giants\u2014Machado de Assis<\/a>, Castro Alves<\/a>, and Euclides da Cunha<\/a>. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil\u2019s most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic<\/a> poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as \u201cthe poet of the slaves\u201d; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os Sert\u00f5es<\/em> (The Backland<\/em>s), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe<\/a> and North America<\/a>, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure. He ends by setting up a wider literary context for his core authors by introducing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors Lu\u00eds Gonzaga Pinto da Gama<\/a> and Joaquim Nabuco<\/a>. The Black Butterfly<\/em> is a revolutionary text that insists Brazilian culture has always refused a clean break between slavery and its aftermath. Brazilian slavery<\/a> thus emerges as a living legacy subject to continual renegotiation and reinvention.<\/p>\n

Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n