Literatures and Négritude in Chile: Outlines of a Long Trajectory of Representations

Abstract

This article offers an approach to three areas that refer to the “black presence” in Chilean narrative works: it shows the time and the type of narratives where characters of African or black origin (mulattoes, zambos, browns or slaves) have been represented in literature since the mid-nineteenth century, establishing an incipient chronology; on the other hand, it is intended to expose the critical studies that have emerged in recent decades that insert the analysis of blackness (negritude) in Chilean literature and, finally, we will give a brief brushstroke on the subject of authorship and the denial of black identities in Chile. The term negritude (négritude) is used consciously for two main reasons: because in the literary texts found, populations of African origin are always mentioned with racializing and colonial categories, the same categories that negritude wanted to highlight, which historically were used in a pejorative way, but that allowed to provoke an identity claim of black people and people of the African origin and, on the other hand, it is interesting to rescue the vindictive sense of the current literary criticism that, having “forgotten” within the Chilean literary canon throughout the 20th century authors who gave prominence to a diversity of racialized characters, currently a (re)reading of said writing is being generated.