A century later, it is still necessary to narrate the amazement: melancholy and interpellation in the short story “Dentes negros e cabelos azuis”, by Lima Barreto

Abstract

Although ahead of his time in many ways, Rio de Janeiro writer Lima Barreto (1881 – 1922) is still reduced to the label of a “pre-modernist.” In this paper, I analyze the short story “Dentes negros e cabelos azuis,” (1918) to demonstrate Lima Barreto’s fundamental contribution to a type of literature contrary to the uncritical celebration of “progress” during the First Republic (1889 – 1930). To this end, I discuss the conflict between Lima Barreto and the modernists of São Paulo in 1922. Then, I turn to the space of the outskirts, the allegory of black teeth and blue hair, and the interpellation between the characters as a possibility of denunciation of Brazilian racism. The central thesis of this paper is that the story uses the antithetic relation between home and street to develop a series of other contrasts, in a narrative mise en abyme sustained by oppositions that reflect the very contradiction of Brazilian modernity. I draw on Black anticolonial and decolonial works, such as the scene of interpellation narrated by Frantz Fanon in White Skin, Black Masks, and the theoretical formulations of Achille Mbembe and Grada Kilomba.