Entre Zumbi e a Princesa: o debate sobre o negro no pensamento estético-político modernista

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation, theoretical, bibliographical, and documentary in nature, explores aspects arising from the relationships between literature, politics, culture, and racism, prompted by a comparative reading of the works of two central writers of Brazilian literary modernism: Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. Grounded on the postulates of Jacques Derrida (1994) regarding the politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations, as well as on Eduardo Jardim’s (2022) and Silviano Santiago’s (2023) remarks about the modernist legacy, we hypothesize that we are heirs but not contemporaries of Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. This hypothesis guides our endeavor to map, extract, filter, sift, and refine arguments and images concerning culture and Black people, produced during the interwar period by these two artists, who were involved with the political and literary groups that originated from the Modern Art Week of 1922. Our aim is to understand to what extent the modernists' arguments support, resonate with, challenge, diverge from, and converge with Brazilian social thought as regards the issue of race. Our results indicate, for instance, that the modernists raised and debated this matter in the public sphere long before the Democratic State of Law recognized the existence of racism in Brazilian society. To conclude, from the perspective of the Black reader, it was possible to observe that the two writers from São Paulo - companions in the debates of 1922 who broke off during the oligarchic crisis of 1929 - engaged in a noisy debate during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) on topics of interest to contemporary Afro-Brazilian literatures, cultures, and histories.