Meet Assistant Professor Ana Cláudia São Bernardo

Not many academics get to work at the same university where they studied.

Ana Cláudia São Bernardo earned her PhD from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies and recently returned to the University of Minnesota.

“I looked up to several professors in the Department of African American & African Studies,” São Bernardo said. “I was amazed at the opportunity to work alongside them. It was an easy decision.”

Now an assistant professor in the Department of African American & African Studies and Institute for Global Studies, she is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies; and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change.

What brought you to the University of Minnesota? 

In addition to the department of African American and African Studies, I am a faculty member in the Institute for Global Studies. I was working in a department of global studies before returning to the UMN and I loved it. I could, for example, talk about Indigeneity, which is a fundamental aspect of Latin America. The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change also weighed on my decision as it provides a research home for the international community here. Working with the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese Studies and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies was also a fantastic opportunity. I can also include in this influential list the Departments of Chicano & Latino Studies, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, and others.

What are your areas of specialty? How did you become interested in what you study and teach? 

I study anti-Blackness, or race and racism, using mainly literature and film. I come from an impoverished community in São Paulo, Brazil, called Cipó-Guaçu. I noticed that being Black had a huge impact on people's lives, including my own. My mother, for example, is a retired maid without formal education. There was never the slightest possibility that she could find a different job because of her skin color. That was the reality of every woman around me. It is difficult to dedicate energy to anything else once one experiences that reality.

Literature was my way of escaping poverty and racism at first. But I realized that creative and biographical literature were doing the amazing work of exposing and fighting the reality that my loved ones and I experienced. Those narratives were also offering ideas on how to create something new. 

For instance, when I read the work of Black Brazilian author Carolina Maria de Jesus, I saw my community in literature for the first time. She has this famous quote that I love: "Brazil needs to be led by a person who has experienced hunger. Hunger is also a teacher..." It is a significant reminder about leadership in times of authoritarianism, repression, famine, and genocide.

Considering my background and my commitments, it was a natural decision to focus my academic projects on the work of Black women and femme authors.

It was also an easy decision to focus on Brazil. Because I had limited resources for traveling, Brazil was everything that I knew until I left to pursue my PhD here.

What questions and ideas are you most interested in exploring right now? What problems does your work seek to address?

Brazilian media has been producing shows and movies where people just happen to be Black and nothing changes in how they experience the world. So I am considering addressing that in an article about TV and colorism. I am questioning why the media is going that route and what changes when important conversations on anti-Blackness get silenced.

I am about to finish my first book manuscript. From the Dumpster to the Bookshelf tells the story of Black women’s use of creative, biographical, and academic literature to resist erasure in Brazil from 1960 until today. Departing from the slum, as Carolina Maria de Jesus describes it in Quarto de Despejo (translated as Child of the Dark, 1960), From the Dumpster to the Bookshelf reflects on the expansion of the spatial, epistemic and literary legacy of De Jesus by seven other authors and a collective of Black feminist women writers. The book shows how these writers expand the very meaning of mobility beyond the restricted sense of social or economic ascension, signifying it as a space of knowledge production where one can freely exist, move through, and grow.

What courses are you currently teaching or looking forward to teaching soon? What's special about them?

I am looking forward to teaching a Learn Abroad Center course in the May session. The title of the course is “Social and Intellectual Movements in Brazil.”  The course will take place in Salvador, Bahia, a beautiful historical site. We will learn from community leaders, educators and organizers about their work to fulfill the specific needs of their communities, their relationship with each other and with the land. I am currently teaching “Race, Class and Gender in the Global South” which focuses on how these three elements are interconnected in different regions of the Global South. We learn about different histories and contextualized ways to deal with racism, sexism and classism. I am also teaching “Introduction to African World Literature.” In this course we read creative and autobiographical texts from countries like Angola and Mozambique. Students love reading and discussing these texts in connection to the context. 

What projects are you working on right now?

I have just finished a paper on Carolina Maria de Jesus' memoir that she titled "Um Brasil para os brasileiros" or "A Brazil for Brazilians." She was really explicit about anti-Blackness in Brazil, including police violence. The book opposed ideas that were circulating at the time, which suggested that racism was mild in Brazil. Jesus handed her manuscript to French journalists who edited and translated the book into French  during Brazil's military dictatorship, where narratives criticizing the country were censored. There are interesting mysteries regarding the story of this publication.It was fun work to dig into archives and talk to specialists and publishers to uncover this story. It also gave the opportunity to bring another dimension to how Brazil sees Carolina Maria de Jesus and the violent editing and publication processes that her work was subjected to.

I am also working with a colleague, Prof. Larissa Higa, who teaches at the Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil, in an article about testimonial literature. Testimonios - as they are known in Latin America - denounces marginalized populations’ experiences with human rights violations. We are focusing on testimonies from mostly black domestic workers in Brazil and the challenges that they face in their profession, from racism to emotional and physical abuse.

This story was edited by Avery Vrieze, an undergraduate student in CLA.