“YOU ARE A VISIONARY”: writing black republican citizenship in Lima Barreto's fiction
Brazilian First Republic. Lima Barreto. Law and Literature.
This thesis highlights literary discourse as one of the main components of the nation project of bourgeois capitalist modernity, emphasizing its influences on legal culture and showing that inclusions in the literary canon are political choices of a model that goes beyond mere aesthetic concerns and that even formal presuppositions are dictated by social conventions beyond artistic taste: it is a dispute for legitimacy and power through the ability to tell the story of a country. And the most popular nation narratives in capitalism are those that legitimize the logic of profit, individualism and the exploitation of bodies. Lima Barreto, the author under study, challenges these assumptions by writing black literature with an inclusive citizenship project.