Further Insights

Gabriel Das Chagas

During the first half of the twentieth century, white supremacy promoted several forms of racism in different parts of the Americas. With the formal abolition of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, new kinds of segregation emerged across the continent, such as the Black Codes in the United States and the federal support of white immigrants in Brazil. In my research, I look at this historical moment, interweaving the works of three Black writers: Lima Barreto (1881 – 1922) from Brazil, Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967) from the United States, and Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920 – 2004) from Colombia. Drawing on Maurice Berger’s concept of “myths of whiteness” and Charles Mills’ Racial Contract, I examine how these authors used first-person narratives in colonial languages (Portuguese, English, and Spanish, respectively) to develop anti-colonial projects, when institutions of white supremacy tried to maintain the power structures of slavery. Based on an intersectional approach beyond the oft-studied constructions of gender, race, and class, I focus on three less studied social markers: disability, sexuality, and place of origin. In this reading, I consider the racialized components of the medical discourse of sanity and madness in Brazil, the white-based discourse of heteronormativity in the United States, and the exclusionary discourse of the American dream in Colombia/Latin America. Thus, I analyze Barreto’s diaries as a Black psychiatric patient institutionalized in an asylum, Hughes’ ambiguous expression of sexuality in his autobiographies, and Olivella’s accounts as a Black Colombian traveling in the United States. As such, I look holistically and multilingually at the Americas to investigate three specific myths of white supremacy that defines who does not belong to the nation: “Mentally disabled people are unproductive,” “queers are unnatural,” and “Latinos are invading the United States.” I argue that race engage and redefine these three dominant ideas, producing the identities of the “Black mad,” the “Black queer,” and the “Black Latino” — all of them perceived as “threats” to the “purity” of the nation. My project, therefore, makes an interdisciplinary contribution to the study of the Americas, interweaving Comparative Literature and Global Black Studies. Seeking an interdisciplinary approach, I pay specific attention to the intersections between Critical Race Studies, Disability/Madness Studies, Gender and Sexuality/Queer Studies, and Transnational/Diaspora Studies.

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