Abstract
With the formal abolition of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, white supremacy promoted several forms of racism in different parts of the Americas. In my dissertation, I look at the historical moment between the 1910s and 1950s, 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’ idea of the racial contract, I examine how these authors used first-person narratives in colonial languages (Portuguese, English, and Spanish, respectively) to develop anti-colonial projects. To do so, I coin and develop the expression “TransAfroAmericas” to name the system of Black individuals that have challenged white supremacy in the “new world” since the sixteenth century. Within this system, I advocate for a multifaceted representation of race, developing the plural notion of “Blacknesses.” 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 nationality. 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. Thus, I analyze Barreto’s "Diário do hospício" written as a Black psychiatric patient institutionalized in an asylum, Hughes’ ambiguous expression of sexuality in his autobiographies "The Big Sea" and "I Wonder as I Wander," and Olivella’s accounts as a Black Colombian traveling in the United States in "He visto la noche."