In the late 1970s, Brazil was experiencing the return to democracy through a gradual political opening and the re-birth of its civil society. Writing Identity examines the intricate connections between artistic production and political action. It centers on the politics of the black movement and the literary production of a Sao Paulo-based group of Afro-Brazilian writers, the Quilombhoje. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production, the manuscript explores the relationship between black writers and the Brazilian dominant canon, studying the reception and criticism of contemporary Afro-Brazilian literature. After the 1940s, the Brazilian literary field underwent several transformations. Literary criticism's displacement from the newspapers to the universities placed a growing emphasis on aesthetics and style. Academic critics denounced the focus on a political and racial agenda as major weaknesses of Afro-Brazilian writing, and stressed, the need for aesthetic experimentation within the literary field. Writing Identity investigates how Afro-Brazilian writers maintained strong connections to the black movement in Brazil, and yet sought to fuse a social and racial agenda with more sophisticated literary practices. As active militants in the black movement, Quilombhoje authors strove to strengthen a collective sense of black identity for Afro-Brazilians.
Emanuelle Oliveira is an assistant professor of Afro-Brazilian and Luso-Brazilian literature at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Oliveira has published articles on contemporary Brazilian literature and politics on the Luso-Brazilian Review and Nuevo Texto Critico, and nineteenth century Brazilian literature on Chasqui and Mester. She also co-translated (with Beth Vinkler) Bitita's Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus (New York: E. M. Sharp, 1999). She is now working on her second manuscript project, The Color of Crime: Delinquency and Representations of Race in Brazilian Popular Culture.
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 A
