Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Vanessa K. Valdés is an independent writer, scholar, speaker, and curator. Her books include Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora, Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, all published by SUNY Press. Earl E. Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil and Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels, among many other books.b>

"This volume is a deserved homage to Fitz's scholarship and his quest to widen the reception of Machado and bring his writings to the forefront of the comparative and inter-American canon." — H-Net Reviews (H-LatAm)"…Vanessa K. Valdés and Earl E. Fitz make a robust case for exploring a vastly understudied facet of Machado de Assis's narrative—its involvement with matters of color, heritage, and social status in nineteenth-century Brazil … Readers and students of Machado's works should embrace the repetitious nature of this collection, for it seeks to remediate a critical perspective as narrow and restrictive as the social structures that created it. These essays contribute enormously toward that end." — Hispania"This book asks not what Machadian Blackness is, but, more importantly, what does it do? How does the author's racial identity open the text and his biography to new debates and discoveries? What are critics to do when an author does not perform his identity in the way he is expected to? Comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Toni Morrison, Milton Hatoum, and Jeferson Tenório show how an inter-American approach to Machado—one that focuses on how his marginalization influenced his aesthetics, point of view, and characterization—has relevance far beyond understanding this single author." — John T. Maddox IV, author of Fractal Families in New Millennium Narrative by Afro-Puerto Rican Women

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Complexities of Disguise: Machado de Assis and His Contemporary MomentVanessa K. Valdés and Earl E. Fitz1. Machado de Assis in Brazil, the United States, and Greater America: A Writer, a Black Writer, Or... A Genius, Our Literary Pelé?Earl E. Fitz2. Black, Then White, Then Black Again: Brazil's Racial Politics and the Changing Face of Machado de AssisRegina Castro McGowan3. "Father against Mother": Race and/in the Reception of the Works of Machado de AssisPaulo Dutra4. Raimundo the Obscure: Enslavement, Abolition, and the Problematics of "Uncle Tom" Agency in Machado's Iaiá GarciaNiyi Afolabi5. Machado de Assis and the Color of Brazilian Literature in the United StatesBenjamin Legg6. Black Writer, White Letters? Machado's Racialized Reception of Identity and AestheticsDaniel F. Silva7. Outsiders Within and Insiders Without: Narrating Race and Identity in Machado de Assis, Milton Hatoum, and Jeferson TenórioDavid M. MittelmanAfterword: A Conversation between FriendsVanessa K. Valdés and Earl E. FitzContributorsIndex