Machado de Assis and Sílvio Romero: slavery, race and scientificism in times of abolitionist campaign (1880s)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the historicity and disagreements around the abolitionism and the presence of the “black race” in Brazil in the late nineteenth century, essentially in the 1880s, in the work of Machado de Assis (1839-1911) and Sílvio Romero (1849-1914). In that period, the great public debates revolved around the literary phenomenon, which is the reason why it was decided to investigate the way the slavery and the abolitionism and the scientific racism appear in the texts of the historian and literary critic Sílvio Romero, as well as in the literary production of Machado de Assis. Both of them were prestigious names in the Respublica litterarum and would become founding partners of the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1897, despite deep intellectual and political differences, which this paper seeks to investigate.

Keywords :
Sílvio Romero; Machado de Assis; history, literature, abolitionism; scientificism, “black race”.