MA Thesis Oral Presentation, Amy Doyle - "“Building Men of Worth”: Gender, Propriety, and the Negotiation of Black Inclusion in O Clarim D’Alvorada (1924-1927)" | College of Arts

MA Thesis Oral Presentation, Amy Doyle - "“Building Men of Worth”: Gender, Propriety, and the Negotiation of Black Inclusion in O Clarim D’Alvorada (1924-1927)"

Date and Time

Location

Mackinnon Extension Room 2020

Details

Founded in the city of São Paulo in 1924, O Clarim d’Alvorada, Brazil’s first independent black newspaper, became a vehicle of cultural inclusion for a class of middle-class black men excluded from social advancement on the basis of their skin colour. Between 1924 and 1927, O Clarim d’Alvorada writers appealed to constructions of gender, women’s writings, and symbols of Mãe Preta in an effort to foster the cultural inclusion of middle-class black men. Writers explicated a definition of proper femininity predicated on the Brazilian bourgeois values of domesticity, motherhood, and more broadly, the maintenance of the familial institution. However, this was not an example of assimilation. Instead, writers engaged in respectability politics whereby writers distanced themselves from the perceived “degenerative traits” of the Afro-descended masses by reflecting their adherence to Brazilian bourgeois social values. By the late 1920s, O Clarim d’Alvorada writers reflected less of a willingness to “prove” themselves, and instead proposed a theory of cross-racial solidarity by appealing to notions of black sacrifice via the symbol of Mãe Preta that more directly opposed the Brazilian establishment. This thesis examines O Clarim d’Alvorada’s deployment of women, and more broadly, gender, as a strategy of cultural inclusion.
Advisor: Dr Karen Racine
Committee Member: Dr. Stuart McCook
Chair: Dr. Norman Smith
External Examiner: Dr. Femi Kolapo