Class, gender and race

Exchanging views on the representation of black working women in the literary productions of Elisa Lucinda, Conceição Evaristo and Deborah Dornellas

Abstract

This article aims to analyze three black female figurations in contemporary Brazilian literature. As a form of artistic expression, literature acts in the materials investigated here, a related, critical and denouncing role of the ethnic social inequalities affected in the corridors of Brazilian history. In order to correlate the constituent elements of these characters, we took as a starting point the trait that, in some proportion, is common to them: the condition of subalternity that is imposed on them in work relationships. From the book Vozes Guardadas, by Elisa Lucinda, we analyzed the poem “A Velha Dor”; from the book Olhos d'água, by Conceição Evaristo, we analyzed the short story “Maria” and from the novel Por Acima do mar, by Deborah Dornellas, we analyzed the character Tia Maria. Evidently, as the title announces, the view developed here is based on an intersectional perspective, in which the three social markers (class, gender and race) are deeply related. In addition, this cross-reading proposes to offer an approximation between poetry, short story and novel, three artistic expressions of different modalities, but which, in their constitutive peculiarities, similarly address the theme of subalternity to which they are relegated as black women in labor relations in the Brazil.