“Noite de Almirante”: Interracial Love in Machado de Assis’s Nineteenth Century

Resumen

In the twenty-first century some scholars started revisiting the works of the mulatto Machado de Assis through discussions about his racial identification and posture with regard to race. As a consequence a new range of reading possibilities has been released. The racial identification of the characters, hence, their interpretations, customarily based on an ideal hegemonic white model of society, began to be revised and challenged. Having racial marks attributed to the characters as the starting point while approaching them reveals Machado’s keen eye on the tension involved in the negotiations of spaces in the not always harmonious relations developed in the extremely mixed-race nineteenth-century Brazilian society. This essay resorts to the short story “Noite de almirante,” hitherto excluded from this perspective, as a case study to demonstrate the potential of such a reading.