Under the demands of time: the political horizon in Jorge Amado’s literary project

Abstract

The publication of Jorge Amado’s Cacau, in 1933, embedded in a context of ideological struggles, raised the discussion among critics and writers about the so-called “proletarian novel”, which had seldom been mentioned in Brazil. Despite the following passionate debates, the genre still lacked a proper meaning as it was understood according to different - and often conflicting - notions. This article readdresses the questions, now under Roberto Schwarz’s perspective on Brazilian intellectual experience, marked by the import and displacement of foreign ideas whose impropriety is expressed in the contradictions presents in the dissonant context of their assimilation. Taking on the debate about the publication of Cacau, this article aims at relating it to Amado’s ideological project expressed in his literary career in order to understand the novel in the displacements operated by the writer so as to adjust the book to the contextual conditions under which it was written.