Machado de Assis Afro-descendant - by Eduardo De Assis Duarte

Machado de Assis Afro-descendant covers poems, short stories, chronicles, textual criticism and excerpts from Machado's novelistic fiction. In addition to enlightening notes, the book contains a set of six critical essays that make up the segment "The poetics of dissimulation". Machado de Assis, an Afro-descendant, confirms the renewed vigor with which, in today's Brazil, with all its sociocultural setbacks, the attention of authors and readers has increasingly turned to the presence of black people, who are becoming more and more powerful every day in literature, the arts, and culture. and in the life of the country. In this sense, this book contributes to a broader understanding of the current times and the plurality of our greatest nineteenth-century writer." - Heloísa Toller Gomes. "Machado's work critically reconstitutes the memory of his time, points to the painful day after and, alongside of issues affecting human beings of all times, does not fail to express "from below" the crudity of a time and a productive system that Brazilian elites did so much to alleviate. And in this surgical cut, he universalizes the issue without ceasing to narrate it as “his time” and “his country”. - Eduardo de Assis Duarte