Marina Barbosa de Almeida to be CCIG Visiting Fellow

Marina Barbosa de Almeida, a Doctoral Student in Literature based at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, will be Visiting CCIG Fellow from September 2009 - 2010, supervised by CCIG members Dr Gail Lewis and Dr Vron Ware. Marina’s project is entitled ‘The construction of blackness and whiteness in literary representations of violence and suffering’, advised by Dr. Sérgio Bellei, at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), in Florianopolis, Brazil. Her work investigates the rewriting of African-American history by African-American writers and how their writing is a step further the logic of opposition of racialist thought. She believes violence, suffering and racial hatred are significant themes/places in the construction of blackness and whiteness in the social and cultural imaginary.

The main objectives of this study are:

1. To examine how and when stereotypical images of negro characters comply, challenge and/or subvert racialist and racist concepts. Questions of the role of performance in the construction of identity, the process of identification and the dynamics of emotion are simultaneously present in the African-American literature. Bearing in mind the danger of essentialization, this study intends to view representations of violence and suffering as more than a rendering of social and cultural victimization.
2. To observe how literary narratives retell the history of African-American identity and culture through their history of violence and suffering. In what ways do descriptions of physical violence and suffering encompass ideas of good and evil, of individual and communal strength and willpower? Here, the construction of the national identity overlaps the process of racialisation in the American society, and whiteness and blackness become key (opposite) identities in this process.