BLACK BOYS IN CHILDREN'S AND YOUTH LITERATURE: MISSING BODIES

Invisibility or subhumanization has been the main characteristics of black bodies in children's and youth literature since their emergence. Especially black boys were marked by stereotypy and vulnerability. Only in the last few decades that this panorama is slowly changing and even so much more favorable for the black girl than for the boy. Therefore, the interest of the present article is to analyze, in a comparative character, these two moments: when the black boy has his voice and identity vilified and, more recently, he is being represented in a more elevated way. In the first group are the books "Dito, o negrinho da fluta", by Pedro Bloch (1983) and "Manobra Radical", by Edith Modesto (2003), analyzed through adapted categories by Maria Anoria J. Oliveira (2003). The works of the second group are: "Mango rain", by James Rumford (2005), "Sosu's call", by Meshack Asare (2005) and "Mama Panya's Pancakes", by Mary and Rich Chamberlin ( 2005), books analyzed from the perspective of childhood experience. This study announces a still fragile panorama about the representativeness of the black boy in children's and youth literature available in the Brazilian publishing market.