DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

SYLLABUS POR 348.1— The Color of Progress: Race and Slavery in Brazilian Film and Literature (#45957) FALL 2017 BEN 1.102 (T/TH 11:00-12:30)

Dr. Sônia Roncador ([email protected]) Office hours: T/TH 2:30-4:00 (BEN 3.132)

Course Description:

This course proposes to demonstrate the “culture of servitude” (Ray & Qayum) that persists in the Brazilian society through a critical overview of representations of black slavery and contemporary forms of black bondage in literature, film and media. This course about the interconnections of race and social subordination is based on the premise that film and literature production has significantly contributed to the circulation of stereotypes of black servilism. One of our goals resides in demonstrating how such mainstream narratives have managed to justify the persistence of an ingrained culture of servitude in modern Brazilian society, and, conversely, to endorse specific myths of non- conflictive cross-racial relations—the most well-known of which identifies Brazil as a “racial democracy.” Additionally, the course provides a critical overview of contemporary Afro-Brazilian intellectual and cultural expressions whose aesthetic and ideological agendas challenge such juxtapositions of servilism and blackness, as well as nation and inter-racial harmony. The diverse cultural expressions comprising the course’s primary materials will be analyzed within their historical contexts, including a variety of topics such as comparative African slavery across the New World; Abolitionist movements and ideologies (past and present); slavery resistance and black activism; and nation-building discourses of racial/cultural miscegenation. This course’s student-centered teaching approach will strongly rely on the class’s diverse cultural backgrounds and participation to enhance students’ ability to communicate complex ideas in the Portuguese language. Through a combination of online and in-class guided discussions about the course materials, students are ultimately expected to enhace their analytical capacity as well as expand their global cultural knowledge.

Prerequisite: POR 327C and POR 328C This course carries the Global Cultures flag

1 Course Materials:

A wide range of essays, stories, and novel excerpts will be made available via Canvas. All films are also available for watching online (instructor will provide hyperlinks to films not available on youtube).

Grading:

Consistent attendance is mandatory. Since four absences are allowed during the semester, please reserve them for illness, religious holidays or other personal emergencies, and do not consider them “free” days. Absence from a class is not an excuse for missing homework assignments or tests. As it is stated by the Academic Policies and Procedures of the General Catalog, “A student who misses classes or other required activities, including examinations, for the observance of a religious holy day should inform the instructor as far in advance of the absence as possible, so that arrangements can be made to complete an assignment within a reasonable time after the absence” (http://www.utexas.edu/student/registrar/catalogs/gi05-06/ch4/ch4g.html).

Students must read all assigned texts in advance and should be able to answer the instructor’s questions on the content and significance of the works; two or three questions will be posted on Canvas prior to each class period. Homework, class attendance, and participation in in-class discussion will comprise the class participation grade. Students should check with the instructor several times in the semester to make sure that they are meeting the course’s standards of participation in class.

Final grade will be based on: class participation (30%); one archival research activity/essay (20%); one mid-term exam (25%); one take-home final exam (25%). Instructor will use “plus” and “minus” grades for final course grades.

Language Policy:

Course will be taught in Portuguese. Although most of the readings will be in Portuguese, non-majors may be able to write their exams in English or Spanish, upon instructor’s consent.

General Policies:

1.The tests cannot be taken before the designated dates. Make-ups are allowed only in cases of emergency. A student with an emergency should notify the instructor as soon as possible so that an arrangement can be made promptly and present documented evidence of the excuse.

2. Emergency is defined as: A. Serious illness or accident or B. Death, or serious illness, or accident in the students’ immediate family. For other circumstances, consult the instructor.

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3. Instructor will make herself available to discuss appropriate academic accommodations that a student may require as a student with a disability. Before course accommodations will be made, students will be required to provide documentation prepared by the Services for Students with Disabilities Office (SSD). To ensure that the most appropriate accommodations can be provided, students should contact the SSD Office at 471-6259 or 471-4641. For more information, read regulations for Academic Accommodations for Students with Disabilities http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/ssd.

4. Scholastic dishonesty: students who violate University rules on scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility of failure in the course and/or dismissal from The University of Texas. Since such dishonesty harms the individual, all students, and the integrity of the University, policies on scholastic dishonesty will be strictly enforced. For more information, visit Student Judicial Services (SJS) at http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/sjs/.

Weekly Schedule:

Week 1/Introduction to the Course 08/31: Syllabus presentation

Part I: Slavery Legacies 09/05: Brazil: An Inconvenient History (BBC production) Slavery—Experience and Resistance 09/07: Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso’s Ser escravo no Brasil (excerpts) 09/12: Lula Buarque de Holanda’s Pierre Fatumbi Verger: mensageiro entre dois mundos (youtube) 09/14: Carlos Diegues’s Quilombo (youtube) Post-Slavery Servitude 09/19: Monteiro Lobato’s “Negrinha” & Machado de Assis’s “Treze de maio” 09/21: Sergio Bianchi’s Quanto vale ou é por quilo? (youtube) suggested: Machado de Assis’s “Pai contra mãe” 09/26: Belisário Franca’s Menino 23 09/28: Slavery Abolition: Archival Research/Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira or essay (Machado de Assis’s “13 de maio”) (Oral Presentations)

Part II: Race and National Identities The Whitening Politics 10/03: João Baptista de Lacerda’s “Sobre os mestiços do Brasil” (1911) 10/05: Olavo Bilac’s chronicles (selection); Antonio de Alcantara Machado’s “Nacionalidade” Racial Democracy 10/10: Kia Caldwell’s Negras in Brazil (excerpts)

3 suggested: Emília Viotti da Costa’s “The Myth of Racial Democracy” 10/12: Gilberto Freyre’s “foot-ball mulato” Mulatas and Mammies Imaginaries 10/17: Jorge de Lima’s “Negra fulô”; Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “O diabo na escada”; “Anjo-Guerreiro” 10/19: Walmor Pamplona’s Mulatas! Um tufão nos quadris 10/24: Mid-Term Exam

Part III: Black Citizenship 10/26: Peter Fry’s “Undoing Brazil: Hibridity versus Multiculturalism” (In Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic) Black Life Stories 10/31: Lima Barreto’s Diário Íntimo 11/02: Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Quarto de despejo (excerpts) 11/07: Conceição Evaristo’s Insubmissas lágrimas de mulheres (excerpts) Black Movements 11/09: Sueli Carneiro’s “Movimento negro no Brasil” & Cuti’s “O batismo” 11/14: S. Carneiro’s “Enegrecer o feminismo” 11/16: Lenira Carvalho’s A luta que me fez crescer (excerpts) Black Media 11/21: Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus 11/23: Thanksgiving 11/28: Mister Brau (Episode 1) 11/30: Black bloggers (http://blogueirasnegras.org/) 12/05: Course Conclusion 12/07: Final Exam Due

4 Slavery: Freedom ‘a long time coming’:

Slavery update/summary:

There were lots of articles on slavery in the newspapers on the 200th anniversary of Parliament’s passing the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

A few statistics of note, from The Observer 25.03.07 (by Rowan Walker), and from Andrew Marr’s History of the World, p 374:

- slavery lasted 300 years

- 12.4 million West Africans were captured and taken abroad, in ships where each man had 9 inches width to lie in, in a ship’s hold, and 2’ 7” headroom.

- nearly 2 million West Africans died on the voyages from Africa to the Caribbean

- ‘add to this the huge death rate caused by the African wars, when the different tribes realised they could make money from capturing others for the slave trade, then the mortality rates in the holding-pens on the coast, ‘and the total death rate was probably higher than the number of slaves crossing the Atlantic – some 16 million.’ (Marr)

- this means, I presume, that nearly 30 million Africans were either enslaved or died...(*)

- 27 million people are estimated to be still enslaved around the world (Walker)

- £20 million compensation was paid to slave owners when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean. Slaves received nothing.

- Walker also recommends: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr Joy DeGruy Leary – the effects of slavery in the long term are still with us.

From ‘Empire of Things’ (how we all bought into the material world...) by Frank Trenmann (Allen Lane, 2016): first half of the book [reviewed Observer 07.02.16 by

5 Ian Thomson] charts the ‘global advance of goods’ from 15th century to today. Slavery takes up much of the story:

- from 1700 to 1808 Bristol and Liverpool developed as a result of the trade in sugar (i.e. goods such as beads, rifles, and gunpowder went to Africa; slaves from there to the Caribbean; sugar, coffee, rice and rum went back to England.

Ambivalence and tensions:

A lamentable but necessary evil:

- many believed slavery was a ‘lamentable evil’ but that it was impractical (inconvenient!?) to abolish it

Racial inferiority:

- and in America [allegedly more influenced by the British moral school] there was a deeply held conviction that blacks were inferior (Himmelfarb p223). So, in America the problem of slavery was ‘even more formidable’ than that of the Indians (Himmelfarb p 221) – since assimilation was not seen as possible, and the only other solution was abolition (which Quakers and Methodists supported).

So, the new American state was founded on a contradiction which would not be removed until the civil war more than 70 years later (Outram).

Christianity was divided on the issue:

- Methodist congregations included many blacks (because the Methodists worked with the poor). Note, as Outram points out, that this had produced an inconsistency: can Christians be held as slaves? And this led to Methodism opposing slavery. (There is a link here with the question of equality for women: if women are equal members of the congregation, are they not equal in society?)

6 - Methodists in 1780: slavery is ‘contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society, contrary to the dictate of conscience and pure religion.’ (Himmelfarb p 222) Methodist preachers freed their own slaves and called on their parishioners to do so (presumably Quakers never had any!) In 1784 they banned slave- owners from congregations.

- William Wilberforce, who is remembered as a significant campaigner against slavery, was an Evangelical, and a friend of the Wesleys, (see Himmelfarb p 129, and there is more here on Methodism…)

- however, when Quakers petitioned Congress after the adoption of the Constitution, it didn’t have any effect, and the only name that had impact was Benjamin Franklin [then aged and ailing] - Quakers were suspect because they had not fought in the war

- on the ‘other side’: the Old Testament had many examples of patriarchs having slaves, and there is no discussion of the issue in the New Testament. Thus (says Outram) although the Methodists used Christianity to oppose slavery, the Virginia slave owners used the Bible against them (p 66)

- Outram says that against slavery were: Methodism and Quakers, and Protestant ‘witnessing’ churches (Moravians and Quakers) – but in favour were: the established churches - Dutch Calvinists, French Catholics, Protestant Southern states of North America.

Obstacles to the removal of slavery:

Economic:

- Outram: there were difficulties for many in opposing slavery because it was so essential to an increasingly integrated world economy, and so impossible to remove slavery without (it seemed) dismantling the whole economic system. The profits from commerce based on slavery were enabling governments to grow (ch 3) which ‘primed the economic pump’ enabling the industrial revolution.

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- Outram: the 18th century was the peak time for slavery in the Caribbean – slaves were taken from West Africa to Brazil (by Portugal), and to the English colonies in North America… Sugar, tobacco, coffee, and indigo were all very profitable, demand seemed insatiable, and there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labour.

Political:

- there could be no movement on the issue of slavery during the war of independence since it would have been divisive

- though the constitution declared all men are created equal, it also had clauses that perpetuated slavery: five slaves were counted as equivalent to three white men for the purposes of taxation (I have seen this defended as simply acknowledging that slaves were more poor…); it allowed the importation of slaves for 20 more years (defended by Madison as better than not putting a time limit); and it required the return of escaped slaves to their owners…

- note how the Constitution avoids the word ‘slave’ (rather it refers to: ‘other persons’ than free people; a fugitive slave was a ‘person held in service’)

- so, how could everyone be given equal and universal rights in face of these institutions, the economic and political forces and needs, and in face of the ‘facts’ of ‘difference’? (Outram)

Different attitudes on the question of slavery and its abolition:

Reason or compassion?

- Himmelfarb (p 234) argues that the movement against slavery, in Britain, was based not on reason but compassion and humanitarian zeal – thus casting doubt on the ‘enlightened’ nature of the Enlightenment emphasis on ‘reason’

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- however, in France the philosophes vigorously opposed slavery and the slave trade, and most called for the immediate emancipation of slaves, others for gradual abolition of slavery (as Himmelfarb points out, p 169) [does it matter what the grounds were? And isn’t Himmelfarb in this instance contradicting the general drift of her book, viz that the best examples in the Enlightenment are those who based their views on social feeling rather than abstract reasoning?]

- opponents of the slave trade were not using really distinct ideas to those used by the supporters of the trade – there was moral ambiguity e.g. Jefferson (Outram p 70) saw blacks as inferior, while trying to get slavery banished. He proposed that whites should be induced to migrate into America to replace blacks, who should be sent away because: there were prejudices against blacks, and because of the ‘physical and moral’ qualities of blacks which would always divide the races and ‘produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race’. (He repeated this in his Autobiography 40 yrs later, see Himmelfarb p 224). In other words he opposed slavery because of its bad effects on the owners, rather than for the sake of the slaves… He made use of what he thought was ‘science’ to make a case, but this can go either way (as with Bible!)… He also argued that once freed they should be deported, and not allowed to mix (whereas slaves in Roman times had not been of a different race, so they could mix). He also continued to own slaves.

- Madison also supported transportation, and opposed the slave trade, without being clearly against slavery.

Other conflicts in enlightenment thinking on the issue:

Liberty versus human rights:

- so, the ‘politics of liberty clashed with the sociology of virtue’ over this issue – (Himmelfarb p 225) maybe the founders hoped that by establishing liberty the problem of slavery would eventually be solved – but it was a long time coming, and the Civil War was bloody and traumatic ‘the most cataclysmic event in American history’ – Lincoln fought to preserve the union, it might be said, in order to abolish slavery

9 Race and difference:

- Outram: a central concern in the Enlightenment was the ‘meaning and manipulation of difference’ (p 74) – which was at the heart of the problem of slavery

- towards the end of the century race came to be used more in the argument (black slaves were seen as a different race) – see Montesquieu’s ironical comment (Outram p 67). There was clearly a problem of taxonomy: where to draw line between humans and animals etc?

- Descartes et al: God created (‘pre-formed’) different races – superceded by Montesquieu and Buffon who argued man had a single origin (though white!), and climate etc changed races – at end of century anatomists found differences in skeleton and cranium – this linked to women (smaller cranial cavities…)

- ‘natural’ emerged as moral category, and so easy to move from is to ought – natural (as in Aristotle) = naturally barbarian/naturally slaves

Slavery and property (Outram p 72):

- Property holding and liberty were connected in the Enlightenment. (Rousseau was an exception in his argument against property). So the attack on slavery was seen as undermining property.

- The opposition to slavery was consequently seen as strengthening government: the attack on property was an attack on property-holders; and, because only government (which was expanding and taxing more during the Enlightenment because of international competition…) can order and organise the emancipation of slaves, this meant giving more power to government – which was argued to be an attack on the rights and liberties of subjects.

The ending of slavery:

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Although attitudes changed during the Enlightenment, actual emancipation was a long time coming:

- Outram points out that Montesquieu attacked the institution in Esprit de Lois 1748

- from the 1770s the ‘elite’ (Outram p 58) French Societe des Amis des Noirs was established, and a British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade which petitioned Parliament. But these still had a ‘primitivist’ view of black people. ‘Abolitionism had no necessary links with seeing Africans as they really are.’

- American Quakers – gradual emancipation began in Pennsylvania 1780, some other states in 1788 banned participation in slave trade.

- first large-scale liberation: St Domingue (now Haiti) in Caribbean, 1792 – 1804. (See footnote).

- there was legislation in 1794 in France ending slavery, but it was soon revoked (1803) and slavery was restored in the colonies e.g. Guadeloupe.

- 1807: trade legally banned in England, 1834 banned from English possessions in Caribbean

- US: 13th amendment 1865, - Brazil: 1888.

- Outram notes that the anti-slavery issue came later than other issues in the Enlightenment such as opposition to torture, tax inequality, and for civil rights for Protestants in Catholic countries, for the end of villeinage, and against the power of the Catholic Church…

11 - she asks: did it end because of the Enlightenment, or because slavery had become so widespread it forced intolerable paradoxes into the open?

- what were the causes of the change in opinion that occurred: Christianity? But it was split on the issue(as above).

- were ideologies of sentiment, humanity and benevolence - as Himmelfarb suggests - more important than religious or economic motives?

Reparations?

Article by Cecily Jones, Guardian Mon 17th March 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/16/caribbean-people-legitimate- claim-slavery-reparations

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