Valdes, Vanessa Kimberly; Fitz, Earl E., eds.. Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas. State University of New York Press, 2024. ix + 200 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781438498812.
Reviewed by Kenneth David Jackson (Yale University)
Published on H-LatAm (May, 2025)
Commissioned by Elizabeth Gansen ()
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61760
“So who is this Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis?” asks Earl E. Fitz, who has devoted his career as professor of comparative literature and Portuguese to teaching, interpreting, and promoting the concept of an encompassing literature of the Americas,[1] and the literary works of Machado de Assis in particular.[2] Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas (2024) is coauthored with a former student, Vanessa K. Valdés, an independent author and leading scholar of the cultural production of Black people throughout the Americas. This collection of essays is above all a tribute to Fitz, who coauthors the introduction and poses the question of the moment on Machado: “A Writer, a Black Writer, Or … A Genius […]?” (pp. 9, 15). Following essays by Regina Castro McGowan, Paulo Dutra, Niyi Afolabi, Benjamin Legg, Daniel F. Silva, and David M. Mittleman, the volume culminates in Valdés’s conversation-interview with Fitz on his career and dedication to Machado de Assis. 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.
Fitz and Valdés both discovered Machado de Assis late in their academic careers and were astonished by his genius on first readings: Fitz was “dazzled,” and Valdés, after reading the Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, states that “I couldn’t believe that this Black man was writing in this way in the nineteenth century. I thought I was reading a contemporary novel, having by then learned about postmodernism and the unreliable narrator” (p. 180). Fitz finds Machado’s genius as a “narrative iconoclast … who saw himself as a writer more than anything else” (p. 182). Both comment on how difficult it is to read Machado because of his demands on the reader, the “signs and codes that much of his reading audience did not notice.” The attentive reader, so Machado says in the novel Esaú e Jacó (1904), will have four stomachs so better to ruminate on his meaning, and character-narrator Brás Cubas upbraids the reader, “God help me! I have to explain everything.”[3] Challenges confront the reader on every level: from the narrative frame, characterization, voice, and meaning to the hundreds of references sprinkled throughout the prose. His novels and stories require reading between the lines, with subtleties beyond the reach of many readers, or as Daniel F. Silva puts it, “the reader certainly has a lot of work to do in connecting these dots” (p. 135).
One of Fitz’s most fundamental questions is why the international reception of Machado, unquestionably a literary genius and even described as the most important writer of the Americas, has still not sufficiently recognized his works or his preeminence, and he offers some possible causes. Is it because only a portion of his prose has been translated into a few major languages, nearly half a century after his death? Is it because he wrote in Portuguese in Brazil, a neglected language in a country often excluded from Latin American literature? If the entirety of Brazilian literature, said to be the most important of the Americas alongside US literature, receives scant attention in international comparative circles, why should one expect more attention, even to the most extraordinary works by Machado? Is the neglect attributable to his modernity and difficulty? Or could it be attributed to his mixed-race status as an African descendant?
To the two long-standing topics addressed across Fitz’s books, Machado’s reception and the literature of the Americas, the volume at hand adds a third, the question of Blackness, or Machado’s racial identity, projection, and reception in Brazil. In these essays written from the context of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement, selected scholars in US universities gave their perspectives on the recovery and restitution of Machado’s Blackness by Brazilian revisionism of the twenty-first century, on his historical reception, on his identity as an Afro-descendant, and on his commitment to the abolition of slavery in his writings. The two main sources cited that energize these essays are Eduardo de Assis Duarte’s 2007 anthology, Machado de Assis Afrodescendente, and the 2019 commission by the Faculdade Zumbi dos Palmares (FAZP) to Grey Brasil in São Paulo that resulted in a revision of an iconic photograph of Machado, which revealed recognizably Afro-Brazilian features.[4] That restored photograph had the salutary effect of overturning almost a century of whitening of Machado by the Brazilian Academy.
Fitz prefaces these collected essays with a precautionary reflection: For a writer who “saw himself as a literary artist above all … the question of Machado’s Blackness, his status as a Black writer, or as a Black literary artist in a society where slavery still exists, is considerably more complex than it might at first appear to be” (pp. 16-17). The complexity invoked by Fitz is embedded in Brazil’s colonial background, as historian Stuart Schwartz summarizes:
Unlike many of the Portuguese outposts and enclaves in Africa and Asia, Brazil became a colony of settlement with cities and towns, a comparatively large European population, the development of agriculture, and a large number of offspring of mixed origin, as well as a large population of African- and Brazilian-born slaves. This was a slave society in which European social hierarchies fused with new rankings based on race or legal status and in which patriarchal and personal authority based on social class combined to set parameters of Brazilian life.[5]
In his chapter, Fitz presents evidence of Machado’s comprehensive treatment and condemnation of slavery in all of his major novels, where he strikingly suggests that exploitation, abuse, and oppression of others could be explained as negative qualities of human nature across time and cultures. In view of his consistent treatment of themes of slavery throughout the novels, and in many short stories, Fitz concludes that Machado “can most accurately be read simultaneously as a Black writer and as a brilliant literary artist” (p. 26).
Machado’s origins were Afro-Brazilian (paternal) and Azorean (maternal),[6] and he lived with his mother Maria Leopoldina to the age of ten, under the care of his godmother Dona Maria José de Mendonça Barroso Pereira, widow of Senator Bento Barroso Pereira (1785-1837), on their estate on Livramento Hill. Machado’s long apprenticeship in literary circles had been supported by the authority of two of the most prominent writers of the time, Casimiro de Abreu and Manuel Antônio de Almeida. Further complications were Machado’s important positions in government ministries; his literary career; his marriage in 1869 to Carolina Novaes, a Portuguese woman from Porto; and his “private, almost reclusive, existence with Carolina for the next thirty-five years,” governed by the desire expressed in one of two surviving letters to retire from the world’s “foolish glories and sterile ambitions.”[7] In his novels and short stories, Machado increasingly turned the narrating over to the characters, while distancing or removing himself as author. The list of initials or invented names with which he signed short stories in the press is long, although he continued to sign many stories, and in 1867 he was awarded the Imperial Order of the Rose from D. Pedro II. By the end of the century Machado was recognized as a distinguished and respected figure.
The burning question discussed in these essays is the assumption that Machado, as a prominent writer of mixed race and Black appearance, did not take a sufficiently vocal role to denounce slavery and racism, as did Lima Barreto (1881-1922) two generations later. Or did Machado do so in his own way—and constantly, as Duarte argues—by embedding the rage in his novels within more opaque literary techniques of situation, characterization, and point of view (p. 27)? Would that be a sufficient rebuke from Machado the “narrative iconoclast” to a society that was the last in the Americas to end slavery (p. 182)? For many essayists in this book, and some before, the answer would be no, even though Machado, as Fitz reminds us, was “fully aware of what it means to be Black or mulatto in Brazil” (p. 21), contributed to the Rio Branco Law in 1871, and as specialist Helen Caldwell noted “his writing was paramount,” and he considered it removed from his life (p. 19). Some essayists would prefer a different Machado and react to his status and comportment as Brazil’s greatest writer with resentment and even anger. The issue in question is whether Machado’s condemnations of slavery were too literary, too distant from his own origins, too oblique for most readers to grasp, or too secondary to his satirical and ironic portraits of Brazilian society.
David M. Mittleman classifies Machado in the perspective of “Outsiders Within and Insiders Without.” In that tension he finds something of Machado’s own malleable social position, reflected in many of his characters who came from humble origins to occupy higher positions, such as Helena and Capitu, and others of high status who took positions on the boundary of their own texts, at least narratively, as did Brás Cubas and Counselor Aires. Is it Machado’s search for belonging, Mittleman asks, that predicts his literary form and the concerns veiled within its structure? Paulo Dutra questions the character Cândido Neves in the story “Father against Mother”—the strongest denunciation of slavery in all Machado’s works. Was he actually Black, since Machado gives no indication other than the “snow” in his name? Was respected scholar Alfredo Bosi just looking through his “white-tinted glasses,” as Dutra writes, in connecting the name to a racial, social, and economic category, as Machado often does in his stories? Perhaps the significance of this disagreement depends on what one considers to be the story’s main point. One may ask whether Arminda, the slave woman in that story, is actually the main character—and one of the great female characters in Machado—for her dramatic, quasi-operatic, public role, shockingly and suddenly revealed in all its surprising intensity and brevity.
“So who is this Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis?” asks Fitz, presenting us with a choice: “A Writer, a Black Writer, Or … A Genius […]?” While the editors’ answer is “brilliance as a visionary writer” (p. 10), “capacious vision” (p. 17), and “genius as a narrative iconoclast” (p. 182), other essays in this collection value Blackness over genius or choose all of the above. The Fitz-Valdez book captures a moment in which the three categories are again placed in competition and conflict, much as David Haberly predicted in 1983, as a perennial conflict between the man and the author,[8] recently revived and sharpened in a 2025 lecture at the Brazilian Academy on “Machado between identitarian themes and international reception.”[9]
Notes
[1]. Earl E. Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (University of Iowa Press, 1991); The Literatures of Spanish American and Brazil: From their Origins through the Nineteenth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2023).
[2]. Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis; Machado de Assis (Twayne Publishers, 1989), Machado de Assis and Female Characterization: The Novels (Bucknell University Press, 2015), and Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels (Bucknell University Press, 2019).
[3]. Machado, Obra Completa de Machado de Assis, vol. 1 (Editora Nova Aguilar, 2004), 19.
[4]. Other contributions to the study of Machado in the context of Black writing cited by Fitz are a 2008 colloquium at University of Hamburg, “Machado de Assis e a escravidão”; the four-volume critical anthology that Duarte edited with Maria Nazareth Soares, Literatura e afrodescendência no Brasil: antologia crítica (Editora UFMG, 2011); G. Reginald Daniel’s Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist(Pennsylvania State University, 2012); and a book of essays by Lamont Aidoo and Daniel F. Silva, Emerging Dialogues on Machado de Assis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
[5]. Stuart Schwartz, ed., Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), xviii.
[6]. The genealogical background researched in Jean-Michel Massa’s pioneering 1971 book, A Juventude de Machado de Assis, 1839-1870, is not mentioned here, nor is his conclusion that Machado descended from humble, illiterate origins, whether in Brazil or the Azores. His mother, Maria Leopoldina Machado da Câmara, came to Brazil in a wave of immigration from the island of São Miguel and, although free, almost certainly had to sell or rent her labor to pay for expenses of the voyage (A Juventude de Machado de Assis, 1839-1870, 2nd rev. ed. [Editora Unesp, 2008], 51). In view of these circumstances, Machado’s intellectual and literary achievements are all the more remarkable.
[7]. K. David Jackson, Machado de Assis: A Literary Life (Yale University Press, 2015), 43.
[8]. David Haberly, “A Journey Through the Escape Hatch: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis,” Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature(Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71.
[9]. Sonia Netto Salomão, “Machado de Assis entre temas identitários e recepção internacional,” lecture at the Academia Brasileira de Letras, Rio de Janeiro, April 10, 2025.
Citation: Kenneth David Jackson. Review of Valdes, Vanessa Kimberly; Fitz, Earl E., eds..Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. May, 2025.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61760
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