Representing/erasing the other in colonial Brazil’s eighteenth-century epic poetry
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Sousa, Sandra [1]
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[1] University of Central Florida
University of Central Florida
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Latin american literature in transition, Pre-1492-1800 / coord. por Rocío Quispe Agnoli, Amber Brian, 2023, ISBN 978-1-108-83883-2, págs. 362-376
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This chapter addresses proto-nationalist, Indianist discourses based on early colonial depictions of Brazil’s lands and people in the epic poems Uraguai (1769) by José Basilio da Gama, and Caramuru (1781) by José de Santa Rita Durão. Both poems offer examples of Indianist tradition that would go on to become models for the aesthetic nationalism of the nineteenth century. Given that the eighteenth century represents a coming of age in Brazilian literature, the absence of Africans in these two poems is noteworthy. This essay explores the simultaneous prominence of Natives and invisibility of Africans in colonial Brazilian literary texts and proposes that the mythological idealization of the Indian was used as a pretext to conceal the problem of the “Negro.” As with any ideology, the literary texts that committed to the building of Brazilian nationhood enforced ways of thinking about Afro-Brazilian people that endure through time.
