The Invisible Blackness of Harryette Mullen's Poetry: Writing, Miscegenation, and What Remains to Be Seen

This essay addresses the poetics of Harryette Mullen, an awarded African-American female poet whose work questions the boundaries that shape the expectations for accessible intelligibility in African-American literature. Mullen’s poems skirt the edges of intelligibility by going beyond the expectations for a visible/intelligible form of language that would embrace the experience of blackness. I argue that writing in Mullen’s poetry works as process of miscegenation by playing on the illegibility of blackness, beyond a visible line of distinction between what is or should be considered part of blackness itself, which engages new forms of reflection on poetry as a politically meaningful tool for rethinking the role of the black (female) poet within the black diaspora.

A poesia de Harryette Mullen e a (des)construção da mulher e de suas fronteiras

Harryette Mullen is a contemporary African-American poet whose work has been increasingly analyzed and commented upon in American literary circles. Along her poetic career, one can identify the development of a complex relationship with the construction of the (black) female identity. Early in her career such construction involved the affirmation of a safer, if not “truthful” locus that could encompass the meaning of the female existence, which has ultimately come to develop a deconstruction, in her current poetry, of any centrality or essentiality in the search for a an authentic female identity. Translations of her poems will be presented in order to investigate their implication for understanding the fragmented body of the contemporary woman.

O papel da tradução na construção da identidade da literatura afro-americana no Brasill

This paper discusses the role of translation in the construction of the identity of African-American literature in Brazil, by considering the relations between the Brazilian sociocultural context, infl uenced by biological and cultural miscegenation, and the particular way that the literary criticism represented by essays and translations of the Brazilian critic Sergio Milliet, published in between the 40’s and 60’s, approaches AfricanAmerican poetry, with special focus on Langston Hughes’ poems. In this paper, differences between Brazilian and American racial contexts are brought into light in regard to the discourses on miscegenation and race. It is discussed the extent to which Sergio Milliet developed a racialized identity for African-American poetry in his essays, which, however, was rebuilt through translation, in his anthology Obras Primas da Poesia Universal, with a less racialized perspective so that African-American aesthetics could sound less dissonant and regional and more inclined towards the principle of universality which characterizes the anthology composed of renowned foreign and Brazilian poets.

Quando gestos não políticos são políticos: a tradução brasileira de Giovanni's Room, de James Baldwin, e a questão da homossexualidade

This work is part of a research project on the role of translations of African-American literature in Brazil and their relation to issues of identity, discourse and aesthetics. It analyzes the translation, by Affonso Blacheyre, of Giovanni's room (1956), by James Baldwin, which was published in 1967 in Brazil. Baldwin is revered for his role in the Civil Rights Movement, having produced works that portray the contradictions of a democratic, but, at the same time, racist society. Giovanni's room was first rejected by his publisher for addressing homosexuality. The text displayed on the book flaps of the translation praises Baldwin's "work with language", in contrast to his anti-racism in other works. The praise of aesthetics of Giovanni's room is noteworthy, in contrast with the absence of any remarks on its critique of the marginalization of homosexuality. The focus on the aesthetics of the work corresponded to characters speaking a more formal register in the translation. Discourses on identity strengthening were less apparent in the 60s in Brazil in comparison to nowadays. The emphasis on aesthetics represented a seemingly "non-political" gesture that made it less shocking in the context of military dictatorship prevalent in the country at the time.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: reflexos de raça e gênero na (re) definição do Buildungsroman

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Mais ou menos negra? Questões de negritude, tradução e a poesia de Harryette Mullen

This paper addresses issues regarding my translation of selected poems by Harryette Mullen, a rising African-American contemporary poet, whose dense poetry works on the black oral tradition, the experimentalism of writing, the (African-American) pop music, in addition to delving into issues such as the representation of (black) female sexuality. One of the complex aspects of her poetry is the notion of miscegenation, conceived as an aesthetic argument and as a constitutive condition of the identity of multiracial Americans. This concept establishes a textuality that questions the accessible intelligibility generally expected from black American poetry, insofar as a mosaic of dissonant voices are brought to light in her text, which makes it difficult to categorize. In Brazil, especially among politically engaged Afro-Brazilians, there has been criticism towards the praise of miscegenation, since the latter has been considered to support of the myth of racial democracy. Building on these aspects, we investigate the extent to which it is a challenge to translate her poetry – based on miscegenation and hybridity as aesthetic constructs – especially when taking into account the discursive locus of readers identified with an Afro-Brazilian aesthetic, particularly critical of miscegenation. From the point of view of translation, we evaluate the extent to which her poetry could be read by the predominant cultural discourse in Brazil, inclined to favor miscegenation as an integral concept of national identity, as a seductively experimental poetry. In view of this, one wonders whether this perspective makes hers poetry “less black” for Afro-Brazilian literary standards.

Definição de um modelo de análise de sucesso das empresas baseado em índices contábeis e na análise multivariada

The objective of this paper is to relate the set of financial ratios that are directly related to the success of public traded companies using a methodological approach and the method of multivariate principal component analysis. This study consists in the use of profitability ratios, debt and liquidity, to define the relationship between financial ratios with the best public traded companies listed in the magazine Exame Melhores e Maiores of 2013. Multivariate analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data, making linear combinations of the original variables (financial ratios) and express the data in principal components that result in new variables that contains much of the original data. As a result, we got the optimal number of five principal components, and both represent 95.6% of the original data. Among of all financial ratios, we can highlight the direct relationship between profitability ratios for the first principal component, and the direct relationship between the liquidity ratios, both inversely related with non-capital participation rates and degree indebtedness to the second principal component

Relationship between race and clinical characteristics, extent of disease, and response to chemotherapy in patients with low-risk gestational trophoblastic neoplasia

Objective. To evaluate the potential effects of race on clinical characteristics, extent of disease, and response to chemotherapy in women with postmolar low-risk gestational trophoblastic neoplasia (GTN).Methods. This non-concurrent cohort study was undertaken including patients with FIGO-defined postmolar low-risk GTN treated with comparable doses and schedules of chemotherapy at the New England Trophoblastic Disease Center (NETDC) between 1973 and 2012. Racial groups investigated included whites, African American and Asians. Information on patient characteristics and response to chemotherapy (need for second line chemotherapy, reason for changing to an alternative chemotherapy, number of cycles/regimens, need for combination chemotherapy, and time to hCG remission) was obtained.Results. Of 316 women, 274 (86.7%) were white, 19 (6%) African American, and 23 (7.3%) Asian. African Americans were significantly younger than white and Asian women (p = 0.008). Disease presentation, and extent of disease, including antecedent molar histology, median time to persistence, median hCG level at persistence, rate of D&C at persistence, presence of metastatic disease, and FIGO stage and risk score were similar among races. Need for second line chemotherapy (p = 0.023), and median number of regimens (p = 0.035) were greater in Asian women than in other races.Conclusions. Low-risk GTN was more aggressive in Asian women, who were significantly more likely to need second line chemotherapy and a higher number of chemotherapy regimens to achieve complete remission than women of African American and Asian descent. Further studies involving racial differences related to clinical, biological and environmental characteristics are needed. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.