Feel the black drama, go ahead and try to be happy: the ambivalences of the black drama in the diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lima Barreto

Abstract

Elaborating the category of black drama as a specific experience of the black people in the diaspora and, at the same time, as a narrative process of this experience, this project aims to develop comparative analyzes of the Diário Íntimo and Diário do Hospício, written by Lima Barreto in the first decades of the twentieth century in Rio de Janeiro, and of Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada, and Casa de Alvenaria: diário de uma ex-favelada, written by Carolina Maria de Jesus between 1955 and 1961. The objective is to investigate the emergence in these productions, as well as in the song "Negro drama" by Racionais MCs (2002), of constitutive ambivalences of the black drama and how they influence or determine the strategies of self-invention undertook in their diaries. In order to do this, parallels will be established between literature and music, especially between literature written by black authors and black music, considering procedures such as repetition and improvisation, which are linked to the ambivalences of an art that has been produced on the boundaries between pleasure and terror, slavery and freedom, domination and resistance. In light of this, this project seeks to investigate how these ambiguities lead to the constitution of a tragic character, associated with the different figurations of the word "black", which calls for a reflection on the limits of the "human" as a category. (AU)