Poetics of migration and dictatorship: Exile and diaspora in the works of Julián Fuks and Francisco Maciel

Abstract

This article deals with the question of exiles and migrations, in relation to the military dictatorship, in two authors of contemporary Brazilian literature: Julián Fuks and Francisco Maciel. It analyses the novel A resistência (Fuks, 2015) according to the concepts of post-memory (Hirsch, 2008) and privatization of trauma (Seligmann-Silva, 2014). Fuks's novel, in its attempt to construct a family's memory of exile and adoption, portrays, through the formal difficulties of writing the book, the political problems of the transitional justice process in Brazil in comparison to Argentina. In the work of Francisco Maciel, racial discrimination against the black population is a central theme. The black movement posed a threat to national security, according to the forces of political oppression. This article analyzes black migrations in Maciel's work through the lens of diaspora (Hall, 2003), and explains how diaspora becomes not only a theme, but also a literary form, in the novel Não adianta morrer (Maciel, 2018).