Afro-brazilian literature and ethnic-racial relations

possible dialogues

Abstract

This article aims to establish dialogues between Afro-Brazilian literary texts and the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations (ERER), seeking to highlight how the analysis of fiction that addresses tensions of race, gender, and class can be approached based on their teachable dimensions, as proposed by Diogo (2020), and how these narratives partially portray Brazilian racism as a logic of place, representing ambiguous relations of superficial acceptance and the impossibility of integration, which result in processes of physical and symbolic violence. To this end, we selected three narratives: “O Caso da Vara,” Machado de Assis; “Os amores de Kimbá,” Conceição Evaristo; “Lua cheia,” Cidinha da Silva. Through analytical reading, we highlight teachable dimensions of these texts and how they can be read as ways of understanding diverse social forms from other perspectives. As a result, we point to the possibility of working on ethnic-racial relations through literature, but to do so it is necessary to continually expand the reading repertoire of undergraduate teacher education students, introducing more Afro-Brazilian authors and systematically incorporating their texts into academic curricula.