Children's literature of yesterday and today:

violence directed at black Brazilian girls

Abstract

This article addresses Brazilian children's literature and the issue of representation of black girls, mediated through the intersectional lenses of black feminism, considering how historically constructed hierarchies produce and maintain social inequalities that permeate the ways in which black girl characters are presented. It problematizes two works: the short story Negrinha (Lobato, 1920) produced in the 20th century and the book “Peppa” (Rando, 2010), produced in the 21st century, dialoguing with interviews with 4 black writers of contemporary children's literature in Brazil. When looking at literature it is possible to see how much racism, the coloniality of being, knowledge and power are present and rooted in the imagination and social and cultural practices. The analyzes reveal how experiences of racial discrimination in young Brazilian childhood are among the central elements for the construction of a process of identity recognition. Recognizing the asymmetry of power between those who nominate and those who are nominated is one of the issues that punctuate the discussion of ethnic-racial relations. The concepts of representation, images of control, symbolic violence are brought to think about the transformations, in the ways in which black girl characters were and are historically narrated in Brazilian literary production, also highlighting the permanences regarding the forms of representation in black children's literature. This debate is timely because they analyze the field of children's literature in order to prevent them from spreading racism and prejudice and are based on an anti-racist black decolonial perspective.