ABSTRACT
This paper’s key proposition is that the issue of openness, of incompleteness of Brazil was built within the debates about the Brazilian Empire’s structural crisis as an asystematic though persistent criticism to the imposed bourgeois order. In that context, André Rebouças, Cruz e Sousa, and Lima Barreto were the bearers of such criticism, but their marginal inscription in their respective contexts conferred them privileged angles to figure out other possible Brazils. However, the tragic outcome of their lives - suicide, starving tuberculosis, and alcoholism - hid their works’ radicality.
Keywords:
André Rebouças; Cruz e Sousa; Lima Barreto; Black intellectuals.