Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature (review)

Emanuelle K. F. Oliveira's Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature is an important study of contemporary Afro-Brazilian literary production. Writing Identity provides an historical and socio-cultural analysis that helps expose the context from which Afro-Brazilian writers emerged; it explores a series of strategies that map the ongoing debates and interests pertaining to issues of gender, canonicity, and race in Brazil. The book also offers a close reading of the literary production.

The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter Oliveira gives a theoretical and historical overview of new social movements. It focuses on the crucial role played by these groups in the construction of collective identities, examining more thoroughly the genealogy of black movements. Chapter two concentrates on the conjunction of politics and literature in Cadernos Negros. The author investigates the appearance of experimental journals aimed at promoting a debate over racial issues. Oliveira traces the constant tension between culture and politics, viewed by many as opposing issues. Yet, as the founders of Cadernos Negros assert, these leftist groups were unable to understand "the political content of culture and the cultural content of politics" (48). Taking into account the first years of Cadernos Negros and a series of interviews, Oliveira begins to scrutinize the tense relationship between the need to construct black awareness and identity and the field of literary production. Refusing to align herself with critics who simply devalue this initial production for privileging the political over aesthetic experimentation, she prefers to let her reader understand the complex and urgent struggle for a collective identity present in this early production. Taking Pierre Bourdieu's theory regarding the field of cultural production as a point of departure, chapter three discusses in depth the reception of Afro-Brazilian authors by literary critics. It explores a tension due to the confrontation between an aesthetic emphasis in the case of the critics and the urge to maintain a political and racial agenda on the part of the Afro-Brazilian authors. In this sense, I believe that, although Bourdieu's theory on the field of cultural production can help us understand the underprivileged position of black literary production, it does not fully answer the question. The process of whitening experienced by such authors as Machado de Assis can illustrate the complexity of this issue.

Chapter four explores the strategies used by Afro-Brazilian authors to "affirm themselves as subjects of their discourse and still strive to gain position in the literary field" (8). Oliveira goes on to analyze Quilombhoje's critical appropriation of the canon and, in the second part of the chapter, she focuses more specifically on Cuti's and Márcio Barbosa's fictional narratives. To this end, she explores the way contemporary Afro-Brazilian writers anthropophagically devour and dislodge Modernismo and Concretismo to achieve their goals. In the case of Modernismo, the author counterposes a canonical literary production marked by an "inclusive" vision of the nation to texts that attempt to capture the violence and injustices usually "forgotten." Cuti's and Barbosa's re-appropriation of Modernist texts aims to expose the existence of an authoritarian, hierarchical and erudite agenda informing the literary canon. As for Poesia Concreta, the focal point is on the way poets such as Márcio Barbosa and Esmeralda Ribeiro make use of some of its aesthetic techniques to generate other meanings with which the black community can identify. The last part of the chapter follows the same pattern. In this case, the emphasis is on Cuti's and Barbosa's social realist narrative production. Chapter five centers on women's production and introduces the question of gender to the discussion. By focusing especially on Miriam Alves's and Esmeralda Ribeiro's literary production, the author attempts to analyze some of the strategies used to bring the female experience to the foreground.

As for its shortcomings, there are just some minor...