From the Dumpster to the Bookshelf: Black Geographies in Carolina Maria de Jesus’ Child of the Dark
Ana Cláudia dos Santos São Bernardo (she, her, hers) is the 2020-2021 Zemurray-Stone Postdoctoral Fellow in Brazilian Studies at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She holds an MA and PhD in Lusophone Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Comparative Literature from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in São Paulo, Brazil. Her research interests include Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian cultures and literature, Lusophone Cultures and literature, Black Diaspora Studies, Critical Race Studies and Black Feminist Studies. She is currently working on her manuscript, “From the Dumpster to the Bookshelf: Black Brazilian Women’s Literature and the Quest for Mobility from 1960 to the Present.” It focuses on how black women authors use their literature to defy assigned spaces in Brazil. Ana argues that these authors create epistemic scenarios to promote mobility for themselves and for new generations of writers. She has worked in the equivalent of K-12 education in Brazil for several years and as a lecturer for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland. Ana is an Afro-Brazilian woman from the outskirts of São Paulo, a fan of capoeira, and the proud daughter of a family of domestic workers.