West Virginia University Press The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination

Review "A groundbreaking interpretation of Brazilian literature in the context of transatlantic slavery and studies of race." Aquiles Alencar Brayner, the British Library"The Black Butterfly is written in an accessible, engaging, and indeed sometimes almost poetic prose, which should make it a compelling read for the general public. The book also makes a significant contribution to Brazilian literary studies, and . . . comparative race studies, Black Studies, and African Diaspora Studies, as well as Comparative Literature." Luso-Brazilian Review Product Description The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giants―Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil's most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as "the poet of the slaves"; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os Sertões (The Backlands), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery.Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe and North America, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure. He ends by setting up a wider literary context for his core authors by introducing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama and Joaquim Nabuco. The Black Butterfly is a revolutionary text that insists Brazilian culture has always refused a clean break between slavery and its aftermath. Brazilian slavery thus emerges as a living legacy subject to continual renegotiation and reinvention. From the Back Cover The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giants--Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil's most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as "the poet of the slaves"; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os Sertões (The Backlands), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery.Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe and North America, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure. He ends by setting up a wider literary context for his core authors by introducing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama and Joaquim Nabuco. The Black Butterfly is a revolutionary text that insists Brazilian culture has always refused a clean break between slavery and its aftermath. Brazilian slavery thus emerges as a living legacy subject to continual renegotiation and reinvention. About the Author Marcus Wood is professor of English at the University of Sussex and the author of several books, including Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of BrazilandAmerica and The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. His book Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America was awarded the best book prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination is, as the title suggests, a tripartite study of one narrow but intensely fertile subject area in the writing of three of Brazil&;s most important and formally audacious authors. Alves was writing in the latte