Afro-Latin and Afro-Hispanic Literature and Classics

This paper examines Nelson Rodrigues’ Anjo Negro (Black Angel, 1946), one of the earliest Brazilian plays with a black protagonist. Although it draws on Greek Tragedy (particularly Medea and Oedipus Rex) and Christian symbolism, the play performs a deconstruction of classical tragic models in order to reinvent the idea of the tragic in a modern framing (cf. Lopes, 1993; Szondi, 2004; Rabelo 2004; Motta, 2011).

Afro-Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella’s historical novel, Changó, The Biggest Badass (1983) follows members of the African Diaspora from their capture and continues through their oppression in Spanish America of the colonial and nineteenth century independence periods, Haiti, Brazil, and the United States from the 1800s to the 1960s. The story of the enslaved has been commonly called the “history of people with no history” (Fontana, Pérez) since with few exceptions, slaves were usually illiterate (Luis).

Recent scholarship on the reception of classical drama in Latin America has attempted to shed light on the ways in which ancient themes and ideas are renewed through interaction with African-based religious beliefs and practices, by focusing on José Triana’s Medea in the Mirror (Havana, 1960), the second adaptation of a story drawn from classical tragedy in the history of post-Independence Cuban theater (Nikoloutsos 2012: 25-7). This paper aims to explore this intersection further through a different case study, Virgilio Piñera’s Electra Garrigó.

This paper examines two distinct ways in which Classical references are incorporated into literary works dealing with the African experience of diaspora in Brazil. Meleagro (1951), by folklorist Luís da Cãmara Cascudo (1898-1986), is an anthropological study on the origins and practice of Afro-Brazilian witchcraft (Catimbó). The book betrays a clear Eurocentric perspective as already expressed in its title.