Black Brazilian literature has strong relations with the social sciences

The link is the conclusion of a study that won the CES Prize for Young Social Portuguese Language Scientists.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – The emergence of Black writers and activists and authors representing what is referred to as “marginalized literature” on the contemporary Brazilian publishing scene coincided with the cycles of approximation and interest among social scientists participating in political and cultural activism movements. Civil rights movements for the Black population and questions related to race, rights and the reality of urban outskirts were covered both by these authors and by sociologists and anthropologists in their work.

This conclusion is drawn in a doctoral study conducted by a FAPESP fellow of the Sociology Department at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas’ Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFICH-Unicamp), who has just won the 9th edition of the CES Prize for Young Portuguese Language Scientists.

Created by the Social Studies Center at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, the prize is awarded biannually to researchers in the social sciences aged 35 or younger in Lusophone countries. One of the main objectives of the distinction is “to promote the recognition of studies that, due to their exceptional merit, contribute to the development of Lusophone scientific communities.”

In 2012, the study received an honorable mention at the “Brazilian Anpocs Competition on Scientific Works and University Thesis in Social Sciences,” conducted by the National Association of Post-Graduate Research in Social Sciences.

“In my work, I analyzed the perception of Black writers or representatives of marginal literature on Brazil and at the same time [attempted to understand] the approximations between social sciences and the Black political and cultural activism movements and Black literature in the country, which in my opinion was a gap in the discussion of the history of sociology,” said Mário Augusto Medeiros da Silva, author of the study.

Medeiros da Silva analyzed the literary production of self-identified Blacks and other marginalized people, such as Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977), Paulo Lins, Reginaldo Ferreira da Silva – Ferréz – and the collective of Black writers known as Quilombhoje, over the period 1960 – 2000.

According to Medeiros da Silva, the works of the authors reflect Brazilian society from the point of view of its ethnic and social conditions and anyone who lives and experiences the reality of Brazil’s urban outskirts. Furthermore, the authors emerged in the Brazilian editorial landscape at a time when political and social activism movements for the civil rights of Brazilian Blacks gained momentum and began to be discussed more profoundly in areas such as sociology and anthropology.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, issues such as racial democracy and the social rights of the most impoverished and underprivileged subsets of Brazilian society were discussed.

During this period, sociologists Roger Bastide (1898-1974) and Florestan Fernandes (1920-1995) published the book Brancos e negros em São Paulo (Whites and Blacks in São Paulo), the result of a study funded by UNESCO on race relations in the country. At the same time, Carolina Maria de Jesus – a Black author and catadora de papel (a person who makes a living from recycling paper collected manually) in São Paulo –published the book Quarto de despejo (Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus) in 1960.

However, this burgeoning movement to discuss racial matters was interrupted by a military coup in 1964. “When the military coup happened, both sociology and Black political and cultural activism were on a collision course with the dictatorship: participants were persecuted and the movement lost momentum,” said Medeiros da Silva.

The Black activism movement would be revived only in the late 1970s when, coincidentally, the authors of Black literature known as the Quilombhoje collective reemerged. Headquartered in São Paulo, the collective began to publish a series of anthologies in 1978 known as Cadernos Negros (The Black Books), which continue to be published today. “But Brazilian sociology was discussing other things at the time, and the debate on the subject changed significantly,” said Medeiros da Silva.

Renewed interest

According to Medeiros da Silva, the social sciences would resume interest in matters linked to the Black activist movement in the early 1980s, when anthropology and sociology began discussions about cities, urbanism and the urban outskirts.

During this period, Alba Zaluar, a Unicamp professor, began a study on day-to-day life in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro entitled Crime e criminalidade nas classes populares (Crime and Criminality in the Popular Classes), which resulted in the A máquina e a revolta: as organizações populares e os significados da pobreza (The Machine and the Revolt: People’s Organizations and the Significance of Poverty).

To conduct the study, Zaluar hired an assistant, Paulo Lins, to conduct interviews with residents of the community of Cidade de Deus (City of God) in Rio de Janeiro.

Encouraged by Zaluary and the literary critic and retired Unicamp professor Roberto Schwarz, Lins wrote the book Cidade de Deus, published in 1997, which led to the movie of the same name.

“We can say that Paulo Lins, as a Black author who never denied his reality, was encouraged by social scientists to write a romance novel that discusses Brazil from the point of view of the marginalized,” concluded Medeiros da Silva. “His case is emblematic of the relationship between social sciences, literature and cultural activism, which is something that I sought to discuss and show in my thesis.”

In addition, in the late 1990s, Ferréz emerged on the Brazilian literary scene with the release of Capão Pecado. By Silva’s assessment, this book made an important contribution to the discussion of Brazilian marginalized literature, written by authors who live in urban outskirts. Nevertheless, the concept was apparently launched with little connection to actions of the past, which were undertaken by writers that had similar purposes, such as Carolina Maria de Jesus.

The social sciences rediscovered the subject in 2000 with the master’s study Literatura Marginal: os escritores da periferia entram em cena (Literature on the Margins: Writers from the Outskirts Take Center Stage) conducted from 2004 to 2006 by the anthropologist Érica Peçanha do Nascimento at Universidade de São Paulo’s School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH – USP), also through a FAPESP fellowship.

“The ideas of Black literature and marginal literature are closely related, and the manners in which these two movements view Brazilian society are very similar,” affirmed Medeiros da Silva.

“The recent history of Brazilian sociology, when it comes to the question of race, could not have happened if there had not been an encounter between sociologists, like Bastide and Fernandes, and political and cultural activists and these Black authors,” he posited.