Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's foremost
novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a
mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity
throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as
an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow
African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of
critics asserted that Machado's writings did reveal his interest in
slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their
interpretations went too far in the other direction. G. Reginald
Daniel, an expert on Brazilian race relations, takes a fresh look
at how Machado's writings were inflected by his life--especially
his experience of his own racial identity. The result is a new
interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his
racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity
and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.
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