Writing Identity

Emanuelle Oliveira is an assistant professor of Afro-Brazilian and Luso-Brazilian literature at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Oliveira has published articles on contemporary Brazilian literature and politics on the Luso-Brazilian Review and Nuevo Texto Critico, and nineteenth century Brazilian literature on Chasqui and Mester. She also co-translated (with Beth Vinkler) Bitita's Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus (New York: E. M. Sharp, 1999). She is now working on her second manuscript project, The Color of Crime: Delinquency and Representations of Race in Brazilian Popular Culture.

Emanuelle K. F. Oliveira's Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature is an important study of contemporary Afro-Brazilian literary production. Writing Identity provides an historical and socio-cultural analysis that helps expose the context from which Afro-Brazilian writers emerged; it explores a series of strategies that map the ongoing debates and interests pertaining to issues of gender, canonicity, and race in Brazil. The book also offers a close reading of the literary production. The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter Oliveira gives a theoretical and historical overview of new social movements. It focuses on the crucial role played by these groups in the construction of collective identities, examining more thoroughly the genealogy of black movements. Chapter two concentrates on the conjunction of politics and literature in Cadernos Negros. The author investigates the appearance of experimental journals aimed at promoting a debate over racial issues. Oliveira traces the constant tension between culture and politics, viewed by many as opposing issues. Yet, as the founders of Cadernos Negros assert, these leftist groups were unable to understand "the political content of culture and the cultural content of politics" (48). Taking into account the first years of Cadernos Negros and a series of interviews, Oliveira begins to scrutinize the tense relationship between the need to construct black awareness and identity and the field of literary production. Refusing to align herself with critics who simply devalue this initial production for privileging the political over aesthetic experimentation, she prefers to let her reader understand the complex and urgent struggle for a collective identity present in this early production.Taking Pierre Bourdieu's theory regarding the field of cultural production as a point of departure, chapter three discusses in depth the reception of A