UC Berkeley

This dissertation conducts a critical examination of narratives of racial democracy in Brazilian cultural production while re-centering sexuality and desire in its analysis. One of many national narratives of race mixture in Latin America, racial democracy in Brazil is the ideology that race does not inform social, political, or economic differences between racial groups on the basis of a centuries-long sexual and cultural miscegenation. While many attribute racial democracy’s ideological birth to Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 text, Casa-grande & senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves), this established principle of Brazilian nationalism was first articulated in literature and art of the nineteenth century’s romantic period. Cultural production in romanticism often depicted interracial unions between white men and black, indigenous, and mixed-race women as metonyms for ethno-racial and class conflict resolution. Nonetheless, little work has engaged the role of sexuality, sex, and desire in the construction of race-mixing ideology in Brazil since then, particularly as it appears in popular culture. While racial democracy promulgates equal inclusion of each race’s influence on the nation, the white minority’s control over national literature and popular culture keeps discursive power over this mixture as truism, one that evokes whiteness’ longings for an illusory past. These representations of history are re-worked in every era of Brazil’s re-invention as a modern nation. This dissertation chooses to analyze these re-worked histories in the media and genres considered most popular as enigmatic examples of the era in which they were produced: the novel in the First Republic (1889-1930), comedy film during the Vargas era (1930-1954), samba throughout the military dictatorship (1964-1985), and soap operas after re-democratization toward the end of the twentieth century. Pulling from Latin American cultural studies, black feminisms, black queer studies, and critical whiteness studies, the dissertation offers queer miscegenation as a mutable hermeneutic of cultural production to explain the racial and sexual abjection upon which racial democracy is founded.

Through archival work and close readings of Brazilian literature, film, music, and television, this dissertation is divided into four respective chapters. The first chapter, “Queer Miscegenation: Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo and Re-reading the Revolt of the Lash,” engages engages Caminha’s allegorical novel as a national fiction at the height of late-nineteenth century literary and scientific naturalism. The homoeroticism in Bom-Crioulo literally and figuratively queers the interraciality common to national fictions by depicting the rise and fall of a relationship between an enslaved black man impressed into the Brazilian Navy and a white immigrant cabin-boy. As the novel’s use of racial science suggests the untenable survival of abject social actors like blacks and queers, I develop the concept of queer miscegenation to show how the characters seek to achieve belonging to the nation through race mixture and their imminent failure. Meanwhile, the novel serves as a script to re-read the history of the 1910 Revolt of the Lash as the press and state projected a racial-sexual degeneration onto the mostly black mutineers protesting the continuation of slavery-like conditions in the navy. The second chapter, “Gilberto Freyre, Oscarito, and Grande Otelo: Colonial Gestures and Race Play in the Chanchadas,” builds on interracial desire between men in the first chapter as a spectacle for whiteness. Focusing on comedy films, or chanchadas, during the Vargas Era (1930-1954) featuring the white-black comedy duo, Oscarito and Grande Otelo, the sadomasochism of slapstick comedy and its racial gestures harkens back to the slavocratic patriarchy described by the contemporaneous theories expounded by Gilberto Freyre. Interracial homoerotic play in the chanchadas and Freyre serve as a space of Brazilian (male) sexual and racial formation considered foundational to Brazil’s modernity.

The latter half of the dissertation envisions how interracial desires, like queer miscegenation, explored in the first two chapters are incarnated within single bodies and their negotiations with whiteness. The third chapter, titled “The Drag of Mestiça Nationalism: Performing Africanity in the Samba of Clara Nunes,” explores the samba career of singer Clara Nunes and how the military dictatorship of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and its institutionalization of ethnic Africanity as foundational to racial democracy came to be reflected in her aesthetic. I use the language of drag to show how, as a white woman, she visually and sonically blackened herself to present as a mixed-race (mestiça) woman through her folklorization of Afro-Brazilian religions and the racial-sexual tropes of spiritual miscegenation. The final chapter, titled “Slavery’s Seductions: Reproducibility and Queer Consumptions in Xica da Silva,” examines how the global hit soap opera, Xica da Silva (1996-1997), firmly planted interracial sexual desire in Brazil’s history in Brazil’s return to democracy post-dictatorship. Re-fashioning the mythicized history of Chica da Silva, an enslaved mixed-race woman who gains freedom and status through an affair with her master, this chapter considers the various racial and sexually queer circumstances of not only this relationship’s recitation on television but the protagonist’s body and her marketing to Brazil and the outside world at the end of the twentieth century.

Thinking specifically about how elite white cultural producers and whiteness-as-paradigm direct the cultural narrative through their performances of blackness as queer and historically inert, this study shows how racial democracy—and the whiteness that drives it—shifts over time. Representations of and a desire for history effectively enact a national project toward modernity. While racial democracy’s provenance intimates interracial heterosexual sex, whiteness’ choreographed performances of an unsophisticated, unchanging blackness strip it of historical mobility and allude its contributions to Brazilian identity to be strictly sexual and abject. Whiteness’ desire for history to secure progress thus coincides with its desire for blackness and queers the national project of racial democracy.