During a summer 2025 residency at Yaddo, a prestigious retreat for artists in Saratoga Springs, Klarman Fellow Eraldo Souza dos Santos will work on their next book project, “Everything Disappears,” which is a family memoir centered on their mother and a meditation on the lived experience of Blackness and enslavement in modern Brazil.
“At the age of seven, my mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister,” Souza dos Santos wrote of the book’s focus. “It was 1968 – 80 years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree.”
Weaving their mother’s personal story with archival research about this period of Brazilian history and interviews with family members and inhabitants, Souza dos Santos narrates a journey to Minas Gerais – the city where their mother was born and where German and Swiss colonization historically contributed to the persistence of Black forced labor – and to Bahia, the Blackest state in Brazil, where she was enslaved for years.
In the book, Souza dos Santos describes their investigations into why the family that bought their mother has never been brought to justice. The book also narrates their grandmother’s journey to find her missing daughter amidst what they call “one of the darkest moments in Brazilian history.”
Souza dos Santos plans to use the time at Yaddo to write a new chapter of this project.
“In ‘Lose Your Mother,’ Saidiya Hartman famously affirms that ‘I am the afterlife of slavery.’ My mother’s life shows precisely and concretely this, and more,” Souza dos Santos said, “It may be more appropriate, as I aim to argue in this chapter, to talk about the life of slavery, or multiple lives, like my mother’s, marked by slavery. Slavery never died.”
Excerpts of “Everything Disappears” have been published in Inkfish Magazine. A related experimental piece was published in Decolonial Passage. Another excerpt will appear in Brick in June.
As a Klarman Fellow, Souza dos Santos is based in the Department of Government, with associate professor Alexander Livingston as faculty host, and has formed interdisciplinary connections with other A&S departments, including the Africana Studies and Research Center, German studies, performing and media arts, and history.
A historian of political thought as well as an accomplished creative writer, at Cornell Souza dos Santos has been preparing a scholarly book on civil disobedience for publication and beginning new academic projects. They will soon join the faculty at the University of California, Irvine as a member of its newly founded Poetic Justice Cluster.
