O Clarim d'Alvorada and the Gendered Negotiation of Black Citizenship in Brazil (1924-1927)

Abstract

O Clarim d’Alvorada, Brazil’s first independent black newspaper, became a vehicle of inclusion for middle-class black men excluded from social advancement on the basis of race. Between 1924 and 1927, O Clarim d’Alvorada writers appealed to constructions of gender, women’s writings, and symbols of Mãe Preta to foster the cultural inclusion of middle-class black men. Writers explicated a definition of proper femininity predicated on Brazilian bourgeois values of domesticity. However, this was not an example of assimilation. Instead, writers engaged in respectability politics whereby writers distanced themselves from the perceived “degenerative traits” of the Afro-descended masses by illustrating their adherence to bourgeois social values. By the late 1920s, writers proposed a theory of cross-racial solidarity by appealing to notions of black sacrifice via the symbol of Mãe Preta. This thesis examines O Clarim d’Alvorada’s deployment of women and gender as a strategy of cultural inclusion.