The Novel as a Counter-Archive Literature in Post-Abolition Brazil

This event will be held in Portuguese.

This event will explore the role of literature as a “source” for historical and sociological interpretation of race in post-abolition Brazil. A central question arises when considering the analysis of this crucial phase in the formation of Brazilian society, which grapples with the scarcity of oral narratives or written testimonies produced by free or enslaved Black individuals who experienced the end of slavery. This paper aims to address this gap by examining how two Afro-Brazilian writers, Astolfo Marques (1876-1918) and Nascimento Moraes (1882-1958), interpreted the transformations of an imperial society divided between citizens and captives into a republic divided between whites and Blacks in their novels, respectively, “A Nova Aurora” (1913) and “Vencidos e Degenerados” (1915).

Speaker: Matheus Gato, Director of Afro-Cebrap, Brazil.

Moderated by Sidney Chalhoub, David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

This event is co-sponsored by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center and Harvard History Department.

Biographies

Matheus Gato is a sociologist specializing largely in race relations in Brazil. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of São Paulo in 2015. Gato’s work focuses on processes of racialization that marked the end of Brazilian slavery (1888) in the state of Maranhão, home to the highest concentration of black descendants in Brazil. Through ethnographic and archival research, Gato analyzes the racial configuration of urban space in the nineteenth century, explores the trajectory of black intellectuals of the period, and conducts close readings of novels and short stories that reveal the formation of black citizenship in post-abolition Brazil. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and has participated extensively in the Global Collaborative Network “Race and Citizenship in the Americas,” an internationalization initiative led by Princeton University and the University of São Paulo (USP).

Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. He has published three books on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of the most important nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, and co-edited five other books on the social history of Brazil. His most recent monograph is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1995, 1999, 2004), a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2007), and a research fellow at Stanford University (2010-11) and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humbold Universität, Berlin (2013). He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT), University of Campinas.