TRANSNATIONAL MARGINS:

WHITE FEMALE WRITERS AND LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF BLACK CHARACTERS IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Abstract

The age of revolutions brought a series of transformations to the organization of Western society. Among these, the Haitian Revolution, specifically, was largely responsible for an urge of the governments, whether independent or not, to discuss the course of slavery in the Atlantic world. Women and black individuals participated in this process and their underprivileged position afforded them particular perceptions of social changes. This paper focuses on three female writers who circulated across the Atlantic through their ideas or as travelers, and, consequently, integrated into the global system of cultural exchanges that have occurred since at least late 18th century. Each of them was born in a different part of the Atlantic: Nísia Floresta was born in Brazil and traveled through different countries in Europe for most of her life; Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in the United States, and traveled mainly after the international success that her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, achieved worldwide; Claire de Duras was French and went through the troubled revolutionary periods in her country, needing to take refuge outside it for a while. What connected the threads of these three stories was their shared interest in venturing into creating representations of black people in works that were quite diverse but engaged in a transnational effort to give personality to a portion of the world population that had been marginalized by European thought, but which gained social prominence after the Haitian Revolution.