Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"This volume is a deserved homage to Fitz's scholarship and his quest to widen the reception of Machado and bring his writings to the forefront of the comparative and inter-American canon." - H-Net Reviews (H-LatAm)

"...Vanessa K. Valdes and Earl E. Fitz make a robust case for exploring a vastly understudied facet of Machado de Assis's narrative-its involvement with matters of color, heritage, and social status in nineteenth-century Brazil ... Readers and students of Machado's works should embrace the repetitious nature of this collection, for it seeks to remediate a critical perspective as narrow and restrictive as the social structures that created it. These essays contribute enormously toward that end." - Hispania

"This book asks not what Machadian Blackness is, but, more importantly, what does it do? How does the author's racial identity open the text and his biography to new debates and discoveries? What are critics to do when an author does not perform his identity in the way he is expected to? Comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Toni Morrison, Milton Hatoum, and Jeferson Tenorio show how an inter-American approach to Machado-one that focuses on how his marginalization influenced his aesthetics, point of view, and characterization-has relevance far beyond understanding this single author." - John T. Maddox IV, author of Fractal Families in New Millennium Narrative by Afro-Puerto Rican Women