Description:

Reading Machado de Assis's work through the lenses of African American literary and critical tradition Prof. Paulo Dutra will discuss racial issues in "Father against Mother" and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif" and the theory of interpretation centered on the Signifying Monkey developed by Henry Louis Gates Jr are the interpretative key for this talk. 

Prof. Paulo Dutra, a Don Quijote aficionado, is a side effect of a self-legitimated system of privileged cultural representation that drove him into becoming a non-traditional college student, an addict to short story writing and reading, a poet, and a teacher/scholar in order to escape performing activities, for a living, that some machine could easily accomplish. He is the author of Aversão oficial: resumida (Malê, 2018) and of the semifinalist of 2020 Oceanos Prize book of poetry ablliterações (Malê, 2019). He specializes in the intersections of race and artistic and cultural production in Luso-Brazilian/Latin-American context with an emphasis on conducting independent approaches to literary and cultural production that present alternatives to mainstream practices. His scholarly work on Don Quijote, race in Machado de Assis’s works, and Racionais MC’s’s rap music has appeared in journals and book chapters in Brazil, Argentina and The United States.