University of Oxford (Centre for Brazilian Studies)

CENTRE FOR BRAZILIAN STUDIES

RACE AND GENDER IN BRAZILIAN LITERATURE

27 May 1999

The Centre for Brazilian Studies of the University of Oxford held its first conference on
Brazilian Literature in St. Antony's College on 27 May 1999. It brought together most
of the academics in the United Kingdom in the field of Brazilian literature and related
cultural studies.

The conference was opened by Professor Leslie Bethell, Director of the Centre, and
Professor Else R P Vieira, UFRJ and visiting Research Associate at the Centre working
in the area of comparative literary and cultural studies.
John Gledson, Emeritus Professor of Brazilian Literature of the University of Liverpool
delivered the opening lecture on 'Machado de Assis and Brazilian history' in which he
highlighted ways in which the theory of history and historical sources were used by this
19th century Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and translator. Apparently small,
insignificant details in Machado's writings, he argued, point to larger themes, revealing,
however, a somewhat fragmented relationship to Brazilian history, references to
historical facts that are usually oblique and an avoidance of certain issues. The writer's
archives and library demonstrate his familiarity with classical historians, the great
historians of the 19th century, anthropologists and philosophers of a negative tradition
such as Schoppenhauer. Yet, history lacks a secure pattern in Machado de Assis which,
Gledson argued by way of conclusion, could be related to the uncertain times in which
he lived. The newspaper O Globo (12-06-1999) featured an article on the conference
under the heading "Machado de Assis e sua ironia começam a derrubar as sérias
muralhas de Oxford".

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The rest of the conference was devoted to race and gender in Brazilian Literature. The
first panel focused on readings of nineteenth-century Indianism. The first contribution,
'Alencar, slavery and the Indian question', by Dr. David Treece of King's College,
London, revisited the nineteenth-century Indianist movement and nationalist discourse
in relation to the contemporary issue of of black slavery. Dr Treece traced the parallels,
both explicit and implicit, that successive writers drew between these two issues during
the course of the Empire, from José Bonifácio, through Gonçalves Dias and Joaquim
Manuel de Macedo, to Alencar himself. In the context of debates within nineteenth
century political theory and the Brazilian polemics concerning liberty and servitude,
civilization and barbarism, integration or marginalisation of Indian and black, the paper
concluded with a comparative examination of Alencar's Indianist novels O Guarani and
Iracema, and the so-called abolitionist dramas O Demônio Familiar and Mãe: these, it
was argued, could be seen as exemplary of a conservative, "Conciliatory" mythology of
the coloured races' self-sacrifice, voluntary servitude and collaboration in the building
of the nation.
Dr. Jean Andrews, of Goldsmiths' College, London, in her paper 'A prince of the
Goitaca at La Scala in 1870: Antonio Carlos Gomes's opera Il Guarany', opted for an
intersemiotic and intercultural handling of the theme, namely, the adaptation for opera
of Alencar's O Guarani presented in the late nineteenth-century in Europe and in Brazil.
The simplification of the original plot imposed by the demands of operatic convention
and the much reduced capacity of a libretto to convey complex narration led to a
conversion of the implicit and highly ambiguous relationship between the indigenous
hero and the Portuguese heroine in the novel into a full-blown operatic romance which,
unusually for an interracial relationship in late nineteenth-century grand opera, ended
happily. The gap between the indigenous hero and the Portuguese heroine is reduced by
allowing Peri to speak the same sophisticated language as the Portuguese, as opposed
to the pidgin he speaks in the novel. He is treated with greater respect, though not as an
equal, by her father and, in operatic terms, his status as a warrior hero is underlined by
the heroic nature of his music. Stressing that Carlos Gomes' work fell out of favour soon
after the short-lived success of Il Guarany, Andrews hypothesized that the very
conventions of late nineteenth-century opera which enabled Gomes and his librettists to
create a love story with a happy ending between a Brazilian Indian and a Portuguese
heiress in 1870 may, ironically, have denatured the substance of the Alencar novel to

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such a degree as to deprive it of any Brazilian cultural specificity, this in order to
respond to the demands of a European audience used to the safe, generalised and
domesticated exoticism of the opera house.

The second panel opened with a paper by Dr. Maria Manuel Lisboa of the University of
Cambridge, '"My Mother's Blood Relation": Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas or the
dead heart of the family'. Her analysis of Machado de Assis's novel (translated into
English both as Epitaph of a Small Winner, Noonday Press, NY, trans. by William
Grossman, and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, OUP trans. by Gregory
Rabassa) is framed by the issue of motherhood in a "confused" national context
importing liberal ideologies. Her argument raises the problematic associations of
motherhood for Brazilians insofar as it interconnects mother (birth, origin), woman and
Europe (a continent, the origin). The need to reinvent the motherland anew,
compromised by colonial experiences, heightens the ambivalence of dependence and
emancipation from given models. Such a symbology of maternity is shown to run
through the novel, whose protagonist's relation with women questions evolutionary-
Darwinian tenets. Virgília, Brás Cuba's lover, smiles as she aborts what is presumably
his child. The well-known chapter on negatives, epitomized by "I had no children, I did
not not leave to anyone the legacy of our misery", is interpreted as exposing the
Darwinian failure.

Ms Jane-Marie Collins (University of Nottingham) and Ms Erika Laredo (University of
Leeds) in their joint contribution, 'Rhetoric and reality: the mulatta in slavery and
freedom', wove literature and history together and stressed the scarcity of scholarly
research on the mulatta. A series of ambivalences and suspicions surrounding the
mulatta were raised: an object of desire that is both celebrated and hated, the possessor
of a beauty perceived both as a source of social ascension and of misery, an actor in a
risky and not consecrated relationship, a concubine whose undecidable status rarely
defines towards marriage, neither free nor a slave in colonial times, a "racial class" in
transition to whiteness and incapable of reaching stability. From another perspective,
the mulatta has become the fantasy of desire of a nation and an object of consumption.
Moving away from such a context, what the contributors have been foregrounding in
their ongoing investigation is the unexploited gendered role of the mulatta as a mother .

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The third panel opened with a paper by Professor Walnice Galvão, University of São
Paulo (USP) and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Brazilian Studies, contributed with
'The question of the mestiço in the work of Euclides da Cunha'. Professor Galvão is
nationally and internationally known for her vast work on this Brazilian writer and the
turn of the century Canudos Rebellion. Her full professorship thesis (1972) was later
published as No Calor da Hora: a guerra de Canudos nos jornais, 4a expedição, which
is a study of the journalistic representaions of the War. She also edited a critical edition,
Os sertões: campanha de Canudos 1902 (São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1985), as well as
Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha, co-edited with Oswaldo Galotti (São Paulo,
Edusp, 1997). Her presentation was based on her ongoing research in Oxford which
was later published as Diário de uma expedição (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras,
2000). Points raised were the immense gap between the press coverage of the war at the
time and the book Os Sertões as a war chronicle. In an encyclopedic impulse, the book
subsumes the sciences and knowledge of the time. Euclides da Cunha, a soldier,
narrates history from the point of view of the army which imposed the modernization
project. In the context of the embattlement of three races (Indians, blacks and whites),
the book emerges as a true statement against the half breed; the native Indian, in his
turn, is incapable of understanding the mental complexity of the white man and the
backland characters (sertanejos) are depicted as brave. Euclides can be said to hesitate
between his conscience and the racist theories of the time. By way of conclusion,
Professor Galvão nevertheless emphasised that all of this weaves into a careful aesthetic
elaboration which grants the book its status as a great work.

Dr. David Murray, University of Nottingham, presented a paper 'Racial Tricksters: A
Comparative Reading of Macunaíma from a North Americanist" in which he explored
ways of thinking about race and national identity. He posed an initial question: Why
wasn't Mário de Andrade's classic work, Macunaíma, written in North America, and in fact
why couldn't it have been written there? To answer that he looked at issues of race and
identity in terms of the themes of transformation and exchange that run through this novel.
The absence in North America or in the British Empire of a recognised place within which
there can be social mobility for people of mixed race and thus a way in which social class
can intermingle with race, he argued, has been addressed by recent discussions of hybridity
(e.g. Homi Bhabha, Robert Young). In Macunaíma, Mário e Andrade's novel of the

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1920s, race does not act as a watertight category. There are a number of unexpected

transformations. Not only does the hero himself change identities and shapes, but the book

itself is full of images of exchange at all levels including the economic. Murray further refocus

Macunaíma by looking at Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquists' Tale, a novel
about love and transgression in modern Guyana. It begins with an indigenous unamed
figure who is clearly recognisable as Macunaíma, used as a generalised trickster figure in
a postcolonial agenda designed to decentre the metropolitan view. An important question
for future thought and discussion is whether Macunaíma is representative of a national
plenitude, a fecundity of possibilities and a potentiality or of an emptiness, a blank, a
chaos.

Finally Professor Vieira chaired the closing plenary discussion on the study of
Brazilian literature, which, she noted, is expanding at an impressive rate not only in the
UK and the US but also in Portugal, and not least in the rest of Latin America. A
specific question posed was: what can the Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies do to
stimulate the study of Brazilian literature and related studies? Variously expressed was

the need to update the critical agenda to cater for a changing concept of literature in the
light of television, video and Internet developments, a context in which literature can no
onger be seen as a monolithic or a homogeneous enterprise. A major suggestion was
the pursuit of inter- and trans-disciplinarity and the exploration of the interface between
Brazilian literary and cultural/media studies. This enables literature to be approached as
a cultural artefact and as a cultural sign interacting with the visual arts, theatre, music
and so on. It would further establish a bridge between the study of Brazilian literature
and anthropology, history and cultural studies. A thematic broadening would also foster
a welcome comparativist approach. Finally, some participants emphasised the need for
more translations of Brazilian literature in English and the setting up of a regular forum

of debates in the form of an e-mail discussion group.

Report by Else R P Vieira