XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Towards a Genealogy of Luso-Afro-Brazilian Saudade

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

The definition of saudade as a word-feeling peculiar to the Portuguese language (to the extent that it becomes an untranslatable) has become an often-repeated truism. In Brazil, it has been equated with the very essence of what it means to be Brazilian. The importance of saudade seems evident, based on the dissemination of the word and its associated feeling through multiple cultural objects across time, from nineteenth-century memoirs and anthropological essays to twenty-first-century pop song and film. However, with a few exceptions, saudade has not been the privileged object of scholarship to the extent that such dissemination merits. Saudade’s roots in Brazil’s social, geographic, and racial orders has yet to be fully accounted for. From Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s medicalization of black nostalgia to Joaquim Nabuco’s saudades do escravo; from Silvio Romero’s myth of national origins predicated on saudade to João Gilberto’s myth of white carioca cool; from Ataulpho Alves’s “Ai, que saudades da Amélia” to Tonico & Tinoco’s “Saudade de Matão”; from Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil to Gugu Liberato’s “De Volta Para A Minha Terra”; and in many other sites and occasions, saudade has helped articulate complex feelings, ideas, and ideologies. This panel proposes to track the many lives of saudade through Brazilian cultural and intellectual history, in the hopes of stimulating scholarly work on the genealogy and operation of this concept. It invites emerging scholarship on the intersections of saudade and race, nationality, gender, queerness, and environment. How does saudade relate to neighboring concepts like nostalgia, querencia, and desterro? How does it connect to experiences of estrangement, migration, and exile? What are the temporal and spatial coordinates of saudade? How is it articulated in different identity formations? These questions offer possible entryways into the history of saudade in Brazil.

Sub Unit

• XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Form Pathology to Aesthetic Object: Nostalgia and Slavery in Nineteenth Century Brazil - Isabela Fraga, Stanford University

• Plantation and Frontier Nostalgia in Silvio Romero and Antonio Candido - Thomaz Amancio, University of Chicago

• Curating European Settler Nostalgia: Commemoration and Saudade Tourism in the Brazilian South - Katie Jensen, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• De-Essentializing Saudade: Unassuaged Longing Under Black Brazilian Feminist Lenses - Irline Francois, Goucher College

• Saudades for Slavery: Longing and Black Queer Temporality in the Telenovela Xica da Silva - John Mundell, Washington University in St. Louis

Chair

• Thomaz Amancio, University of Chicago

Session Organizer

• Isabela Fraga, Stanford University