Modernismo negro: amefricanidade, oralitura e continnum em Lima Barreto

Abstract

This text invests in the discussion about the existence, constitution and characterization of a black modernism, in Brazilian literature, triggered from the work of Lima Barreto. At first, after a brief discussion on the central discursive formations of São Paulo modernism, we investigated the tensions, continuities and ruptures that mark the relations between the Rio de Janeiro author and the group of the week of 22. In this framework, central categories in the constitution of the field national literary texts such as: between-place, rupture and critical assimilation are considered inappropriate, as an exclusive critical apparatus, to instrumentalize the understanding of the specificities of Barretian work, which, in turn, brings into play an epistemic and political repertoire linked to the black cultural tradition in Brazil, until then neglected by the traditional field of Brazilian criticism. With this movement, Lima Barreto's work requires, for his exegesis, a new set of theoretical and critical devices that challenged and challenged the literary field. In the sequence, we seek to demonstrate how the attributes of the Barretian work are marked by black-Brazilian culture. We used three notions as the basis for this argument: language, territory and memory. From these discursive nuclei we endeavor to present two central aspects of the Barretian work: a) how the work of the black novelist dialogues intensively with the Afro-Brazilian cultural repertoire, resulting from the processes of reterritorialization of African culture in Brazil; b) the fact that his work constitutes a powerful critical contribution to the modern project, above all, the way it was developed in Brazil, through the duplication of the colonial structure in the modernizing movements of Brazilian society. In the third movement of this text, we seek to speculate on the contributions of Lima Barreto's work to contemporary Brazilian society, starting from three nuclei: the constitution of an ethics, its contribution to the work of the black intellectual, and its importance in the constitution of a criticism literature that is less Eurocentric and more open to dialogues with the multiple epistemic inscriptions of Brazilian culture. As a starting point for this research, we established Lima Barreto's novels as a corpus, and undertook a bibliographic survey of his works and Brazilian modernism. In establishing the theoretical framework, we resort to dialogue with a field that has been solidifying in Brazilian criticism and which is characterized by the production of a critical and analytical repertoire produced from black culture in Brazil, therefore, consistent with the central objective of this study, or that is, to analyze the work of Lima Barreto from a non-Eurocentric theoretical framework, thinking and pushing the limits of the critical field of Brazilian letters. For this purpose, we dialogue more intensely with the works of Muniz Sodré (2002), (2017), Leda Maria Martins (1997), Lélia Gonzáles (1988) and Beatriz Nascimento (2007), José Henrique Freitas (2016), Edmilson de Almeida Pereira ( 2010), (2017)