Juó Bananére, an Italian Brazilian writer

Abstract

This paper was carried out to analyze the language of Juó Bananére, pseudonym used by Alexandre Ribeiro Marcondes Machado (1892-1933), trying to understand his literary and historical implications within Brazilian context at the beginning of the 20th century. Based on the Italian immigrant’s jargon which mixed Portuguese with Italian, the writer created a comic representation of that immigrant, who faced difficulties in order to adapt himself to Brazilian society. In that creation one points out the broken style through which several issues concerning the social, political, historical and cultural order were broached, notably the literary one. One proposes here to analyze specifically Juó Bananére’s writer face, who said he was himself a poet, barber and journalist, in order to observe the way the character represents, more than the Italian immigrant’s situation, the status of Brazil as a colonized country facing the contradictions resulted from such a process.