CROSSINGS: SPACES OF THE HOUSE AND BLACK LIVES

Abstract

This study, triggered out by the reading and translation process into English of the short story ‘Cândido Abdellah Jr.’ by Cristiane Sobral (SOBRAL, 2021), aims at analyzing the space of the house as a space of good and evil, noting aspects of intimacy and identities portrayed in Sobral’s short story. Considering, as well, questions of whiteness and the literary imagination in its casting the black man or black child out of intimacy: a gesture trying to erase singularities and differences, so to impose a superiority that reassures territories. Prejudices and punishments that have been a constant in the history of Brazilian social imagination pervades Sobral’s short story, still, in a movement of giving clues, the author surprises the readers with new outcomes for Cândido, the main character in the story. In a comparative and intercultural perspective, translation has been a path to dialogue with temporalities of a diaspora, times and voices that emerge when listening to the potential noises of the text.