SOURCE: Martins, Leda Maria. “Voices of the Black Feminine Corpus in Contemporary Brazilian Literature.” In Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, edited by Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek, pp. 195-202. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

In the following essay, Martins chronicles attempts by black women writers in Brazil to create a language of self-definition and expression that reflects their condition, both as women and as black women.

In the last decade the debate about women's role and figurations within the context of Brazilian literature and society has been very fruitful. A variety of essays not only give focus to women's social conditions in our society but also critically unveils the masculine gaze from which the representation of feminine characters had risen in Brazilian literature and social imagination. The debate has also focused women's literary production, though the research about Black women writers...