Accessibility Controls: High Contrast | Larger Font | Listen to this page
Abstract
Maria Firmina dos Reis and the demands for Human Rights in abolitionist literature

Literature has always served as a platform to point out injustices, to gain the reader’s empathy for oppressed people and to demand equal rights. Since the colonial law of the 19th century did not allow the participation of women or men of color in jurisdiction and politics, this contribution analyzes the demands for Human Rights in the literatures written in Latin America in the context of abolitionism. After a theoretical introduction (Abdias do Nascimento, bell hooks) and a broader overview on the genre of abolitionist literature, I will focus on a concrete literary example: Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917) was the first Black female Brazilian author to write a novel, the first to initiate the genre of “literatura negra” in Brazil, the first to imagine the experience of slavery from a Black perspective and the first in both American sub-continents to write fiction about slavery. In her novel “Úrsula” (1859), her short story „A escrava“ (1887), and her poem “Hino à libertação dos Escravos” (1888), she argued for moral supremacy versus white supremacy, demanded justice and pointed out the necessity for a set of laws that would later be included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Presenter Biography
Dr. Catarina von Wedemeyer is a fellow of the Humboldt foundation at Columbia University, New York, and a faculty member at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena. Her current research is dedicated to the demands for human rights in nineteenth-century Romance literature. From 2018 to 2019 she was visiting professor at Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen, and before that she held a position as research associate at Freie Universität Berlin. Recent publications include her monograph, Open Dialectics. Poetic Form and Historical Thought in the Works of Octavio Paz, De Gruyter, 2019; articles on the topic of migration in literature, intellectual resistance in the avantgarde, the Arabic heritage in Hispanophone literature, as well as articles on female Latin American authors of the 19th century. Catarina was awarded several research fellowships in Spain (Madrid, Segorbe), in Ankara, in Jerusalem (HUJI), in Mexico (UNAM, Colmex), at Harvard University (Boston) and at Columbia University (New York).

This is a public page. Anyone can visit and view this page at the URL below: