Maria Firmina dos Reis: a literatura subversiva de uma mulher negra contra a escravidao no brasil do século XIX
Maria Firmina dos Reis: the subversive literature of a black woman against slavery in 19th-century Brazil

Summary/Abstract: For over a century, the Brazilian literary canon ignored the name of Maria Firmina dos Reis, the first black woman to write an abolitionist novel in Brazil, still in the midst of the slave order: Úrsula (1859). She was also the author of short stories and poetry, as well as the novel Gupeva (1861-1862). Maria Firmina dos Reis also stood out as an intellectual who challenged the patriarchal order, having worked in the area of education with ideas that were innovative for the time. In order to discuss the absence of Maria Firmina dos Reis from the Brazilian literary canon, this article analysed aspects of the author's life, characteristics of her work, and texts and documents of the nineteenth century and dialogued with more recent research that identified the historical and political reasons for the lack of knowledge of the author in recent Brazilian literary historiography. It was evidenced that the absence of Maria Firmina dos Reis from the discursive production of literary historiography was not only limited to the very context of the denial of civil rights of the black population during slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century, but also reached the afrodescendants in the twentieth century, well after the Lei Áurea of 1888. In conclusion, the analysis of the work of Maria Firmina dos Reis allows us to highlight her critical position towards the slave society and the use of narrative resources of social denunciation, which allowed her to become one of the precursors of Afro-Brazilian literature, which emerged in the period of the abolitionist revolts, but received little attention from academic critics.

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