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This presentation is in conjunction with the LASPP Dissertation Workshop.
Abstract: This study examines two novels written by Black intellectuals during the first decades of the post-abolition era in Brazil. The first is the historical novella *A Nova Aurora* (1913), authored by Astolfo Marques (1876–1918); the second is titled *Vencidos e Degenerados* (1915), written by Nascimento Moraes (1882–1915). Both texts were published in the city of São Luís do Maranhão, located in Brazil’s agrarian North. Each in its own way, both books constitute interpretations—viewed from the country’s periphery—of the emergence of contemporary Brazilian society, a society founded upon free labor and republican institutions. In this sense, these works of fiction can be read as "documents" of a specific social experience. This point is particularly relevant in the Brazilian context, given that historical and sociological research regarding the end of slavery in the country frequently grapples with a scarcity of narratives—whether oral or written—produced by free Black individuals or enslaved persons who lived through the abolition process. Yet, we must ask ourselves: what kind of "document" is this? How does it preserve and generate knowledge? My argument is that these novels function as a form of "counter-archive" across three dimensions: 1) the perspective through which they portray and engage with factual reality, thereby challenging official chronologies; 2) the manner in which they conceptualize and imagine history—specifically, how they interrelate events and arrange them within the narrative—ultimately constructing a particular "sense" of history; and 3) the fictional representation of how society is organized, how its various social groups are constituted, and the processes by which they undergo transformation. This final point is among the most significant, for it is here that fiction generates historical knowledge that transcends—and extends beyond—mere "factual" data. In this work, they demonstrated the manner in which the chosen novels realize each of these three dimensions in a particular way.
Matheus Gato de Jesus is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Unicamp. He is the coordinator and researcher of the Afro Nucleus/CEBRAP. He holds a master’s and doctorate from the University of São Paulo. He was a visiting researcher at Princeton University and Harvard University. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts. He is the author and editor of several books and articles whose main themes are: racism, racial classifications, racial violence, Black intellectuals, literature, and post-abolition. He is the author of O Massacre dos Libertos: sobre raça e república (Editora Perspectiva, 2020), winner of the award for best scientific work from the National Association for Research in Social Sciences (ANPOCS) and a finalist for the Jabuti Prize.