The Childhoods of Bitita and Juan Francisco Manzano: Autobiography as Critical Fabulation in Black Authorship

Abstract

The objective of this article is to understand the effects of the colonial-slave system on perceptions of childhood by analyzing two autobiographical texts. The first presents Juan Francisco Manzano who narrated his memories as a boy enslaved in Cuba in the early nineteenth century, in The Autobiography of Slave (1840). In the second, we follow Bitita in Bitita’s Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus (1982), by Carolina Maria de Jesus, whose narrative reveals how colonialism structured Brazilian society in the post-abolition period. By marking two distinct historical moments, we seek to glimpse how the literary genre of autobiography allows the affirmation of Black authorship beyond a single denunciatory bias, accompanying possible negotiations that build unique ways of making literature. We thus understand the movements of critical fabulation present in these texts as practices of freedom and construction of identity.