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.

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.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.