XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Plantation and Frontier Nostalgia in Silvio Romero and Antonio Candido

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

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between nostalgia for the land and nostalgia for the slave-holding plantation in Brazilian social thought, particularly among elites. As Roberto Ventura has observed, the theme of the decadence of the large rural estate, which traverses several decades in Brazilian literary and intellectual history, is marked by a pervasive “saudades do engenho”, a phrase he found in the work of Silvio Romero. Romero’s pioneering folkloric and critical work was premised on a nostalgic relationship with the plantation where he spent part of his childhood, a key source of the folklore he collected, but also of a sentimental relationship with the people enslaved there, as well as with the popular cultural manifestations he observed, and with the landscape itself. For decades afterwards, nostalgia for rural life was inextricable from nostalgia for slavery and its associated hierarchies of prestige, even among the lower classes. In the 1950s, Antonio Candido found traces of this sentiment among sharecroppers in rural São Paulo, who yearned for the golden days when their bandeirante ancestors had ample access to land and slaves in the colonial frontier. The persistence of this imaginary begs further examination, particularly about the racial, economic, and cultural hierarchies that inform rural nostalgia. How do forms of plantation and frontier nostalgia converge and diverge? How did Romero and Candido situate themselves with relation to them? Through a cross-reading of their works, I seek to explore these questions.

Author

• Thomaz Amancio, University of Chicago