XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Saudades for Slavery: Longing and Black Queer Temporality in the Telenovela Xica da Silva

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

Abstract

The Brazilian telenovela Xica da Silva (1996-1997) expands on the longstanding tradition of mythification of Francisca ‘Chica/Xica’ da Silva, an enslaved mixed-race woman in eighteenth-century Minas Gerias who gains freedom and status through her powerful master-turned-consort. With Xica’s attempts to socially whiten herself through European dress, mannerisms, owning and disciplining enslaved property, and using her newfound wealth to seek vengeance on her rivals, her characterization alleges the fluidities—historical and cultural—of race, gender, and class as structures of power in late twentieth-century Brazil. The humor intended in Xica da Silva relies on the excesses of blackness in dialectical relationship with white longings, hunger, and saudades for slavery. The historical ‘distance’ of slavery and its transformation into an erotic comedy that is reflective of 1990s racial politics bring about slippages in temporality around race and sex. Iconic scenes, like Damião’s feijoada, and equivalencies that are drawn in the media between Xica da Silva and Taís Araújo, the actress who plays her, offer new understandings of the saudades felt for representations of slavery through readings around black queer time. Using queer reading and archival research, this paper engages Xica da Silva and its marketing as a lens through which sexuality and desire are envisioned to be equalizers in nation-making frameworks like racial democracy. The telenovela’s impact across the Americas and the Lusophone world further establishes the seductions of saudades within nationalist narratives of race mixture and how re-centering sexuality helps to pick apart the white heteropatriarchy that continues to command them.

Author

• John Mundell, Washington University in St. Louis