The Racial Dilemma in the Biographical Writings about Machado de Assis

ABSTRACT Between the years 1908 and 1939, the readings made by several critics and writers about Machado de Assis’s life revealed a writer averse to the racial issues of his time. They accused him of distancing himself from sensitive issues at the time, such as Abolitionism and the establishment of the Republic. The intellectuals and scientists’ speech, motivated by the scientistic-racist spirit in Brazil in the 19th century, also influenced in the erasure of Machado’s Afro-descendance, who was considered white on his death certificate. Only during the 1930s, based on the successful critical-biographical study by Lúcia Miguel Pereira (1988), the writer’s black identity began to be claimed. Through anthropological, sociological and critical-essay studies, we will situate the ways in which scientific racism, simultaneously with the end of slavery and the rise of the new political project, influenced the consolidation of white readings on the memory of the mestizo writer.