The First Page: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction

THE FIRST PAGE

Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction:
A Bilingual Anthology

edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Julio Ludemir
and Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro

30 September 2024

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 3 October 2024, the anthology Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction launches at the IAS. This bilingual compilation of 21 short stories from both established and emerging Afro-Brazilian voice responds to the worldwide call for Afro-diasporic narratives. Although Brazil is the largest Afro-descendant country outside of Africa, the literature produced by Black Brazilians is mostly unknown both in Brazil and abroad.

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Making contemporary Afro-Brazilian short fiction more accessible to English speakers
by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva

The idea for this anthology was born from the lack of materials on contemporary Afro-Brazilian short fiction in English translation. Inspired by UCL’s commitment to research-led learning, decolonising the curriculum and opening up the classroom to the community, in 2020, I proposed to my department a new module on the representations by and of Afro-Brazilians in prose and poetry from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, which would be examined through the lens of major cultural movements, political events and theoretical approaches to literature and racial thought. My ambitious goal was to select works that would provide a spectrum of topics, themes and forms, including internal explorations in poetry, the social, economic and political circumstances of Afro-Brazilians, the lives of women in a racist, sexist and patriarchal society, and experimentations with language. I had a good number of translations of novels and short stories to choose from, including those by Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto’s The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma, Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, Paulo Lins’s City of God and Conceição Evaristo’s Ponciá Vicencio, to which we can now add the recently published Phenotypes by Paulo Scott and Ursula by Maria Firmina dos Reis. This was not, however, the case for short fiction, especially by the vibrant new generation of Brazilian writers who identify as Black. The only exception was, as far as I knew, Geovani Martins’s The Sun on My Head: Stories, the launch of which I had the pleasure of attending at Foyles, in London, on 27 August 2019. Geovani Martins is one of the literary talents emerging from the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (Flup); his book was nominated for the prestigious Brazilian Jabuti prize and became a worldwide success.

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ANA CLÁUDIA SURIANI DA SILVA is Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies at UCL.

JULIO LUDEMIR is a published author, journalist and the CEO of the Literary Festival of the Peripheries.

MARIA APARECIDA ANDRADE SALGUEIRO is Full Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and researcher 1D at Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and FAPERJ (State of Rio de Janeiro´s research funding agency)

Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction will launch on 3 October 2024 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: FlyD via Unsplash.