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One More Story: Racial Relations and Stereotypes in Brazilian Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
The article deals with race relations in Brazil, analyzing how adult and children’s literature in Brazil has worked to maintain and update the “Prospero complex”. The article is guided by the hypothesis that the main challenge is to mover narratives, literature and textbooks to go beyond the homogeneity of a single story based on white as representative “natural” of the human species that discursively places the “other” as “deviant”; from the hegemony of the white hierarchy for plural discourses. In Brazilian literature racial hierarchies are largely profuse and profound. The analysis of “the Negro as an object” indicates the presence of some striking black characters as the few characters with a tendency to subordination and inferiority. The alternatives are linked to the “black literature” that demonstrates richness and strength but at the same time this literature is maintained as “marginal.” In children’s literature the process is very similar, observing continuous forms of hierarchy of whites as superior and blacks as inferior. The article discusses the production of alternatives and other new literary discourses and the need for teacher training.
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