A grammar of alterity: Recordações d’uma colonial (memorias da preta Fernanda) as a laboratory of literary coloniality

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of Recordações d’uma Colonial (Memorias da preta Fernanda) (1912), by Alberto António May Totta and Fernando Machado, as a laboratory of literary coloniality. Grounded in a critical approach that articulates literary writing and colonial ideology, the purpose of this study is to understand the work as a site of experimentation of a grammar of alterity, within which narrative procedures of racialization, eroticization of the Black female body, and the pedagogy of colonial assimilation are rehearsed. Through the use of a false autobiography attributed to the protagonist, the text constructs a subaltern voice that appears to legitimize racial and civilizational hierarchies from within. The article thus demonstrates how these dispositifs operate at the level of reception, naturalizing stereotypes and transforming the Black female body into a privileged locus for the inscription of patriarchal and imperial power, anticipating mechanisms that would later find widespread articulation in African-set colonial literature institutionalized through the establishment of the Concursos de Literatura Colonial/Literatura Ultramarina.