Litterature dos Negros. Contos, Cantigas e Parabolas.
Lisboa [Lisbon]: Typographia do Commercio, 1900. First edition (issued as a separata from A Tribuna; the parent journal could not be traced). Later half-leather binding, with the publisher’s original front wrapper bound in. 119 [3] p. Old bookseller’s stamp on the wrapper. Ownership inscription on the title page. Paper uniformly toned due to age. The extremities of several leaves professionally reinforced or restored with Japanese paper. The original wrapper mounted on modern stiff paper. The final leaf entirely backed with Japanese paper on both sides. Overall a good copy.
Scarce first edition of the first printed collection of Guinean orature, by the first indigenous author from Bissau.
Litteratura dos negros, compiled by the Guinean canon Marcelino Marques de Barros, is a foundational work in the history of Guinean and Lusophone African literature and the first book-length collection devoted to the oral literature of Guinea-Bissau. The book is considered the first collection of Guinean orature and one of the earliest written records of the country’s popular aesthetic production, and Barros is described in parts of the scholarship as the earliest indigenous Guinean author, preceding the formation of a national literary tradition. The volume brings together a substantial corpus of tales, songs, and parables drawn from local traditions and presented as literature rather than as incidental folklore (Havik, 2004; Nunes Jr., 2022).
Narrative texts and song lyrics constitute the greater part of the volume, accompanied by brief commentary by Barros, which serves to introduce the material, note its performative conditions, and draw comparisons with Portuguese folk traditions. Particular attention is paid to oral transmission, memory, and performance. The book includes early documentation of women’s songs later understood as cantigas de mandjuandadi, a genre Barros was the first researcher to record and describe (Calado, 2015). His collections subsequently became primary source material for later studies of Guinean oral culture.
Barros treated African orality as a form of intellectual resistance, rejecting late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European frameworks that framed Africa through primitivism, essentialized difference, and colonial hierarchy. He argued for the historical depth of African civilizations and for the equality of African and Iberian cultures, using oral literature to question racial hierarchies, reshape social understanding, and expose the instability of imperial claims to cultural superiority (Nafafé, 2012).
Marcelino Marques de Barros (Bissau, 1844 – Lisbon, 1928) was a priest in Guinea-Bissau and later a teacher at the Colégio das Missões in Cernache do Bonjardim, Portugal, and an early researcher of local languages, customs, and oral tradition, active from the late nineteenth century. Before the publication of Litteratura dos negros, he had already produced linguistic studies, comparative vocabularies, and ethnographic essays in learned journals, establishing himself as one of the earliest scholars of Guinean Creole and orality. Later scholarship consistently characterizes his work as pioneering, both for its early date and for its method: the systematic collection and publication of oral narratives and songs in several local languages. Within Guinean literary historiography, his work is treated as foundational, and he is regarded as a pioneer in the collection and dissemination of oral tradition and as one of the earliest indigenous figures associated with what would later develop into Guinea-Bissau’s literary tradition, preceding the formation of a national literary system in the mid-twentieth century (Nunes Junior, 2022; Serra e Deus-Marçal de Carvalho, 2023).
The present book thus stands as both a pioneering act of cultural preservation and an early, sustained challenge to dominant racial and cultural discourses within the Portuguese imperial world.
Extremely scarce on the market; no record traced in RBH.
Refernces: Calado, K. A. (2015). Ancestralidade e imagens de nacao no cantopoema No fundo do canto, de Odete Semedo. Dissertação de mestrado, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte; Havik, P. (2004). Silences and Soundbytes: the gendered dynamics of trade and brokerage in the precolonial Guinea Bissau region. LIT Verlag Munster; Nafafe, J. L. (2012). African Orality in Iberian Space: Critique of Barros and Myth of Racial Discourse. Portuguese Studies, 28(2), 126–142. https://doi.org/10.5699/portstudies.28.2.0126; Nunes Junior, M. (2022). Poder blufo: uma leitura da peça “As orações de Mansata” de Abdulai Sila (Trabalho de conclusão de curso, Licenciatura em Letras – Língua Portuguesa). Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira, Sao Francisco do Conde, Brazil; Serra e Deus, L. P., Marçal de Carvalho, W. (2023). A literatura da Guiné-Bissau. LiterÁfricas, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. https://www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro/literafricas/literatura-da-guine-bissau
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Price: €4,000.00