Educational Encounters: (Re)Writing Identity in Twentieth-Century Brazil and the U.S.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates literary articulations of identity in twentieth-century Brazilian and U.S. fiction through representations of education. Focusing primarily on Afro-descendant and women authors—including James Weldon Johnson, Rachel de Queiroz, Romeu Crusoé, Ralph Ellison, Lygia Fagundes Telles, and Angela Jackson—I analyze how shifts in educational access during the 1910s–1970s influenced these writers’ portrayals of identity as something learned and performed. Central to this study is the argument that these authors employ education as a narrative strategy, revealing the ways in which identities are imposed, negotiated, resisted, and redefined. I propose two interpretive frameworks—“educational encounters” and “horizons of expectations”—to demonstrate how educational scenes elucidate the racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions that structure formal pursuits of knowledge. This dissertation adopts a transatlantic comparative lens, engaging with Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s framework of “culture wars around the postcolonial Atlantic” to explore how universalist ideals—largely inherited from French philosophical and political traditions—persist and transform within Brazilian and U.S. literary contexts. By placing these authors in dialogue across national and linguistic boundaries, I illustrate how their work sheds light on ongoing philosophical and political debates about who has historically been permitted to represent the universal human subject, contrasted against who has been relegated to particularity. This dissertation also recovers Romeu Crusoé’s overlooked legacy within Afro-Brazilian literary history. By drawing on previously untapped biographical and archival research, I reconstruct Crusoé’s career and establish his central role in twentieth-century Afro-Brazilian literature.