XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Form Pathology to Aesthetic Object: Nostalgia and Slavery in Nineteenth Century Brazil

• In Event: Towards a Genealogy of Luso-Afro-Brazilian Saudade

Abstract

While Brazilian poets, novelists, and social scientists have understood saudade to form a distinctive characteristic of the Luso-Brazilian identity, few of them acknowledge its connection with the history of Atlantic slavery and medicine through the illness of nostalgia and its Luso-African counterpart banzo. This presentation will examine one of the key texts that helped establish longing as a characteristic feature of Brazilian affect through the figure of the nostalgic enslaved African, namely, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s medical thesis Considerações sobre a nostalgia (1844). Published at a time when nostalgia was a pathology caused by forced estrangement from one’s homeland and broken kinship, Macedo’s text claimed that such illness was one of the main causes for the high mortality rates among the enslaved populations in Brazil, therefore posing a danger to the country’s agriculture. In examining Macedo’s text, this presentation will argue that the figure of the nostalgic enslaved African operated not only as an object for scientific and medical inquiry but also as a rhetorical tool for Macedo’s own aesthetic self-fashioning as a man of feeling. In so doing, this paper will also explore the connection between Romanticism and capitalism in Brazil. 

Author

• Isabela Fraga, Stanford University