Figurations of the Negra in Gonçalves Crespo and Caetano da Costa Alegre

This paper analyzes two poems, by Gonçalves Crespo and Caetano da Costa Alegre, both entitled “A negra,” and dating from 1882 and 1884. My comparison focuses on the writers’ revindications of the figure of the negra. Drawing on Alfredo Bosi’s understanding of historically-situated, “resistant” literary texts, I argue that the poems show their writers grappling with—and partially subverting—poetic conventions that were hostile to the affirmation of the beauty and dignity of African and Afro-diasporic women, particularly in comparison to the figure of the loira, a commonplace of nineteenth-century Portuguese poetry. The poems pushed the boundaries of what could be said concerning race and beauty in late-nineteenth-century Portuguese verse, while respecting certain conventions so as to be formally and conceptually “legible.” I contend that we should understand these poems in terms of Bosi’s ideology/ counter-ideology dyad, as exercises in ideological and poetic negotiation rather than examples of uncritical conformity, or of a radicalism that, per Bosi, would have been unavailable to these writers.