Constelações do poeta negro: imagens de Adão Ventura no arquivo literário

Abstract

This study "CONSTELLATIONS OF THE BLACK POET: images of Adão Ventura in the literary archive" aims at studying the images of Afro-Brazilian poet Adão Ventura born in Santo Antônio do Itambé, Minas Gerais formed by three categories: oeuvre, criticism, and the set of documental registers that constitute his archive. Furthermore, we have exhaustively mapped his poetic works, which were scattered among periodicals, national and international anthologies, and audiovisual material. In order to do so, it is necessary to summon the "con-stellation" metaphor which allows us to perceive, figuratively, the modes of production and organization of such documents. Subsequently, it is possible to analyze the images that can be obtained from this process, in which spatial representation attempts to outdo linear representa-tions of time. The relation between the several different images (as well as their clusters: what was idealized by the author, what was imposed by critics, and what is to be suggested here), these images will be ordered, contrasted, confronted, as to promote a reading that goes against the grain. We therefore intend to comprehend the working mechanisms of Adão Ventura's place in literary historiography, in contrast with such place as idealized by him, according to what can be inferred from the study of his archive and documents. Our study of primary sources seeked vestiges of Ventura's acting in the intellectual/literary field of his epoch, arti-culating this documental corpus into five groups: "Constellation of Originals published and unpublished and the use of pseudonyms", in which we worked with original, unpublished texts in relation to published books; "Institutional acting, a public worker", in which we traced the poets professional profile based on documentation; "The poet and his network of rela-tions", which analyzes books found in his library; "Clipboards thematic series on Racism and Prejudice", which consists of a documental background on racial relations, carried out by means of clipping pieces of news from periodicals. The employment of the constellation me-taphor has allowed us to reflect on the modes of organization of the documental realm, which confront the naturalness of organized systems at the same time that the choice of clusters indi-cates/signals the subjective disposition of these universes. Hence, this Afro-Brazilian poet's catalogue, which has recently been incorporated to the Acervo de Escritores Mineiros (Li-brary of Writers from Minas Gerais), at the Faculty of Letters in the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), will be able to reconfigure the reception and the memory of an Afro-Brazilian poet whose poems transit through international anthologies and collections of the best poems in Brazilian literature but which, in Brazils literary history, still lacks bigger visi-bility.