Exploring Brasilidade through the postcolonial crime fiction tradition

Penfold, Tom 2019. Exploring Brasilidade through the postcolonial crime fiction tradition. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60 (5) , pp. 527-537. 10.1080/00111619.2019.1635076

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Abstract

Daniel Galera’s Blood-Drenched Beard is a murder mystery set in a rural fishing village in Brazil. It is a page-turning crime narrative that traces a man’s search to solve his grandfather’s murder. In this article I stress Brazil’s postcolonial situation and consider Brazilian crime writing as fundamentally linked to postcolonial detective narratives from Southern Africa. This departs from previous accounts that instead illustrate Brazilian crime fiction’s relation to other Latin-American writing. Following Primorac (2011), this new connection makes it possible to read Blood-Drenched Beard as a national allegory of sorts. By doing so, I argue that Galera advocates a need to critically re-examine Brazil’s past and how to take these lessons into the future. I suggest his novel deconstructs the national myth of “brasilidade” and promotes the need to embrace, and not erase, the divisions structuring Brazilian society.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis
ISSN:	0011-1619
Last Modified:	01 Oct 2024 15:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/171952

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