Quarto de despejo: Gênero, raça e classe no Brasil a partir da escrita de Carolina Maria de Jesus (anos 1950).

Abstract

Carolina Maria de Jesus was an Afro-Brazilian writer who was born in 1914, in the city of Sacramento, Minas Gerais. She wrote novels, prose, songs and proverbs, but was best known for her diaries. Her most notable book was Quarto de Despejo – diário de uma favelada, published in 1960, which was well received by literary critics and sold millions of copies. This work aims to analyze how the life story of the writer Carolina de Jesus was crossed by the social markers of gender, race and class, problematizing how these three elements help to understand the intellectual trajectory of a poor black woman who lived in Brazil in the 1950s. As research sources we used her literary productions, especially the books Quarto de Despejo (1960) and Diário de Bitita (1986), in which the writer narrated her days in the favela, recounting some days from her childhood to life adult. Methodologically, these books were prepared based on the proposals of Leandro dos Santos Fernandes (2015) on the uses of literary sources. In theoretical terms, the concepts of collective memory, by Maurice Halbwachs (1990), were used; memory, by Michael Pollak (1992); gender, by Joana Maria Pedro (2005); and mainly; the concept of intersectionality, by Bilge (2014) and Ochy Curiel (2005).