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19 - Maria Firmina dos Reis, Nineteenth-Century Maranhão (Brazil)

from Part III - Envisaging Emancipation during Second Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Erica L. Ball
Affiliation:
Occidental College, Los Angeles
Tatiana Seijas
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Terri L. Snyder
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton
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Summary

Maria Firmina dos Reis was born in São Luiz do Maranhão, a remote northern province of the Brazilian Empire, probably in 1825. The daughter of a black father and a white mother, and a self-taught woman who had never received formal education, Maria Firmina became the youngest elementary teacher in a newly founded local school. In 1859, she published the novel Ursula and became the first black woman to publish a literary text in Brazil. Ursula not only offers harsh criticism of slavery and the slave-owning patriarchal family, but also gives narrative voice to enslaved characters and their reflections on life under captivity. Forgotten for more than a century, her work started to gain recognition in the 1970s. Nowadays revered as a pioneering black novelist, she is, along with Luiz Gama - former slave, also a self-taught man who became a lawyer, poet and anti-slavery militant - the founder of Afro-Brazilian literature.

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As If She Were Free
A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas
, pp. 344 - 356
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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