A personagem mulata em Gabriela, Cravo e Canela: teorias da mestiçagem e da democracia racial na literatura amadiana

Abstract

The present research intends to analyze the social and political spot that is assigned for the black woman, in the Gabriela, Cravo e Canela novel by Jorge Amado, released in 1958. From the comprehension of fictional production is also a historical record, this research tries to do a systematic reading of this novel. Seek to investigate which are the performance molds attributed to the central character, as well as list how such definitions that underlie the protagonist are linked to the idea of miscegenation. Through studies of Antonio Candido, where literature is debated as a social instrumentalization in which a partial view of those who write it is foreseen, and that, therefore, is expressed in the political and social trajectory of the writer Jorge Amado. The novel was resumed in order to systematize, through this reading, the relations and relevant reflections that could contribute to the understanding of historical process of construction of an image of the black woman in fiction, but that is organized by the theories in vogue in the period of miscegenation and racial democracy. Therefore, the study aims to discuss the way in which the black woman was represented in the literary spectrum amadiano, seeking to understand how the discourse of miscegenation reaches this historical agent. In this way, as indicates Abdias do Nascimento, literature, as well as other instruments of discourse, is hegemonically "at the service" of the dominant class, soon they are the ones who have narrative control, producing and reproducing images that reinforce the social imaginary of black women. Here, in Gabriela, cravo e Canela, theories of miscegenation and racial democracy are presented as a vestige of the project devised by the elites for the black population in the post-abolition period, diluting the power of the black presence in the national narrative.