the black butterfly marcus wood Th e Black But erfly brazilian slavery and the literary imagination west virginia university press morgantown 2019 Copyright © 2019 by West Virginia University Press All rights reserved First edition published 2019 by West Virginia University Press Printed in the United States of America ISBN Cloth 978-1-949199-02-4 Paper 978-1-949199-03-1 Ebook 978-1-949199-04-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wood, Marcus, author. Title: The black butterfly : Brazilian slavery and the literary imagination / Marcus Wood. Other titles: Brazilian slavery and the literary imagination Description: Morgantown, West Virginia : West Virginia University Press, 2019. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019869| ISBN 9781949199024 (cloth) | ISBN 9781949199031 (paper- back) | ISBN 9781949199048 (Ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brazilian literature–19th century–History and criticism. | Brazilian literature– 20th century–History and criticism. | Alves, Castro, 1847-1871–Criticism and interpretation. | Machado de Assis, 1839-1908–Criticism and interpretation. | Cunha, Euclides da, 1866-1909–Criticism and interpretation. | Slavery in literature. | Slavery–Brazil–History. | Abolitionists–Brazil–History. | Africans–Brazil–History. | Blacks–Brazil–History. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Caribbean & Latin American. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Slavery. Classification: LCC PQ9550 .W66 2019 | DDC 869.09/35881–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019869 Book and cover design by Than Saffel / WVU Press Contents List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 1. Castro Alves, O Navio Negreiro, and a New Poetics of the Middle Passage 13 2. Castro Alves, Voices of Africa, and the Paulo Afonso Falls: From Afro-Brazilian Monologic Propopeia to Brazilian Plantation Anti-Pastoral 47 3. Obscure Agency: Machado de Assis Framing Black Servitudes 82 4. “The child is father to the man”: Bad Big Daddy and the Dilemmas of Planter Patriarchy in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas 135 5. Magnifying Signifying Silence: Afro-Brazilians and Slavery in Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões 171 6. After-Words and After-Worlds: Freyre, Llosa, Slavery, and the Cultural Inheritance of Os Sertões 218 Conclusion 245 Notes 277 Index 307 Illustrations 1. Detail from Turner, Slave Ship 31 2. Stahl, Paulo Afonso Falls 64 3. Azevedo, Polka-Lundu 119 4. Agostini, Law of the Sixty Year Olds 121 5. Paff, “Slave Performing as Carrier for Child” 147 6. Corpse of Antonio Conselheiro 174 7. Surviving Prisoners at Canudos 175 8. Coutinho, “Bodarrada” 263 Introduction The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination is first and foremost a tripartite study of one narrow but intensely fertile subject area, namely slavery, in the writing of three of Brazil’s most important creative writers, Castro Alves, Machado de Assis, and Euclides da Cunha. The book, however, also incorporates an introduction and conclusion that set these key figures in wider literary contexts. The introduction thinks about Alves, Assis, and da Cunha against the backdrop of later populist Brazilian authors writing on race, and Gilberto Freyre in particular. There is also a brief consideration of Caribbean Negritude writing and its relevance for Alves and Assis in particular. The conclusion sets up a wider literary context for my core authors by introduc- ing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama and Joaquim Nabuco. The conclusion also considers the dubious status of what has been claimed to be Brazil’s only surviving slave narrative, written by Mahommah G. Baquaqua. Alves was writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but his major poems on slavery discussed in this book were all published after his death (1871) in the late 1870s and into the 1880s. Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), technically Assis’s most experimental work, and also the work contain- ing his most subtle and devastating treatments of slavery, came out in 1880, eight years before the Lei Áurea, the Brazilian Abolition Law, was passed in May 1888. Assis died in 1908. Two other novels containing significant mate- rial on race and slavery were published: in 1904, Esaú e Jacób (Esau and Jacob), and in 1908, Memorial de Ayres (Counselor Ayres’ Memorial). Da Cunha pub- lished his masterpiece Os Sertões (The Backlands) in 1902, although he worked on the manuscript for the previous five years. The Black Butterfly provides the first comparative extended study of how slavery and its cultural legacies have been creatively approached in very different intellectual, formal, and political ways by three exceptionally bold experimenters. The opening discussions of each key author in chapters 1, 3, and 6 provide detailed introductory consider- ations of why and how each author has been constructed around the aesthet- ics of Atlantic slavery. This short introduction serves a different function and 1