Abstract
This article tracks the changes Machado’s figure underwent during over a century and a half and shows how classifications regarding race and color are projected upon the writer and his work. During his lifetime, his mixed-race features were stressed by detractors such as Augusto Fausto de Sousa and Sílvio Romero and minimized by enthusiasts like Joaquim Nabuco, who considered him to be white and only saw “the Greek” in him. In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics and biographers started associating mulattoism to psychopathology, which supported the constitution of the exceptional being, the genius who overcame all original challenges and filled a prominent role in the country’s cultural life. From the 1930s, the mestizo started to be positively emphasized in line with Gilberto Freyre’s thinking, which culminated in the reconfiguration of the writer as an exemplary mixed-race Brazilian during the Estado Novo (New State). More recently, Machado de Assis has been reclaimed by black movements that aim at configuring him as an icon of Negritude. This article recomposes and documents the path of the Machadian figure based on issues of color and race and examines how they are projected upon a character who has been at the center of literary, cultural, and political debate in Brazil for over a century.
Resumo
Abstract
This article tracks the changes Machado’s figure underwent during over a century and a half and shows how classifications regarding race and color are projected upon the writer and his work. During his lifetime, his mixed-race features were stressed by detractors such as Augusto Fausto de Sousa and Sílvio Romero and minimized by enthusiasts like Joaquim Nabuco, who considered him to be white and only saw “the Greek” in him. In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics and biographers started associating mulattoism to psychopathology, which supported the constitution of the exceptional being, the genius who overcame all original challenges and filled a prominent role in the country’s cultural life. From the 1930s, the mestizo started to be positively emphasized in line with Gilberto Freyre’s thinking, which culminated in the reconfiguration of the writer as an exemplary mixed-race Brazilian during the Estado Novo (New State). More recently, Machado de Assis has been reclaimed by black movements that aim at configuring him as an icon of Negritude. This article recomposes and documents the path of the Machadian figure based on issues of color and race and examines how they are projected upon a character who has been at the center of literary, cultural, and political debate in Brazil for over a century.
- © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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