Dissident Desires - Brown Digital Repository - Brown University [PDF]

Dissident Desires: Race, Sex and Abolition in 19th Century Brazilian Literature

BY Lamonte Aidoo B.A., Lincoln University, PA., 2007 A.M., Brown University, 2011

A dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2012

 Copyright 2012 by Lamonte Aidoo

This dissertation by Lamonte Aidoo is accepted in its present form by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date _____________

______________________________ Nelson H. Vieira, Director

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date _____________

______________________________ Luiz F. Valente, Reader

Date _____________

______________________________ Anani Dzidzienyo, Reader

Date _____________

______________________________ Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date _____________

______________________________ Peter M. Weber Dean of the Graduate School iii

iv

VITA

Lamonte Aidoo was born in Hartford, Connecticut. From 2004-2007, he attended Lincoln University, P.A. and graduated Summa Cum Laude with Bachelor of Arts degrees in French and Francophone Studies and Hispanic Studies. In 2007-2008 he was a J. William Fulbright Scholar in Bogotá, Colombia where he researched and documented Afro-Colombian urban displacement narratives. In 2011, he received a Masters of Arts in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University. From 2008- 2012, he has been in residence at Brown University and is coeditor of the forthcoming Lima Barreto: New Critical Perspectives published by Lexington books.

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing “Dissident Desires: Race, Sex and Abolition in 19th Century Brazilian Literature” has been an arduous and revelatory process. I would first like to acknowledge my advisor and readers that have proven indispensable in this process. My sincerest gratitude to Nelson H. Vieira for his constant feedback, belief in my ability and this project, and continuous support of my work, musings, and abstractions; Luiz FernandoValente for his passion and excitement for 19th century literature, insightful feedback, and the independent study that rendered the idea that became this very dissertation; Anani Dzidzienyo for his friendship, dedication and willingness to impart the many gifts of his knowledge that greatly influenced the very imagining and conception of this dissertation; Keisha-Khan Y. Perry for her wisdom, encouragement, professional/sisterly advice, and ability to challenge and expand my intellectual boundaries; Leonor Simas-Almeida for her courage to read literature “ beyond the margins;” Ama Ata Aidoo for her example, kindness and support; Daniel Silva for being more than a colleague; To the wonderful galera of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies for their camaraderie (Lauren, Isadora, Adi, Thayse, Lucas, Ben, Steve, Sarah, Josh, Linda, Sandra, and Brianna); Candida Hutter for the gift of her smile and friendship; Armanda Silva for her hard work that has not gone unnoticed; Valerie Petit Wilson for her encouragement, love, fearless vision and influence. To the late Tiffany Thigpenn for her friendship, love, and belief in the person I was to become. To my sister Lowanna for remembering that as a child I always chose books over toys. And finally, to my dear mother Peggy Thomas to whom this dissertation is dedicated, for her love, patience and prayers.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title page .........................................................................................................................i Copyright page .................................................................................................................ii Signature page ..................................................................................................................iii Vita...................................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................v Table of Contents .............................................................................................................vii Introduction: Unveiling a Myth—Excavating a Body ....................................................1 Chapter 1: Evicting the Black Body: Domestic Allegory of Interracial Desire in ..........12 Artur de Azevedo and Urbano Duartes’s O Escravocrata Chapter 2: Desire Disavowed: Critical Re-membrance, Belonging and the Abject Pornography of Torture in Aluísio Azevedo’s O Mulato ................................................58 Chapter 3: Predatory Perversions: Same Sex Desire, Prostitution, and the Emancipation Body in Adolfo Caminha’s Bom Crioulo .......................................................................117 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................169 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................173

vii

Dissident Desires: Race, Sex and Abolition in 19th Century Brazilian Literature

Introduction Unveiling a Myth—Excavating a Body These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually "transfers" from one generation to another…? —Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" And all of those associations to the internalized world of human sexuality are now projected onto the sexuality of the Other. —Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness

In his seminal text Casa-Grande & Senzala, Gilberto Freyre foregrounds one of the most detailed and contemporaneous genealogies to date of the development of race relations in Brazil. Freyre’s text articulates how the evolution of race in Brazil was tantamount to the evolution of national identity and the enunciation of what has now come to be known as the myth of racial democracy. Although Freyre most certainly is not the founder of this concept, however, he unquestionably is credited for its popularization and eventual internationalization. At the core of Freyre’s conceptualization of the myth of racial democracy, is that Brazil was founded and fashioned upon miscegenation, or race mixture; as such, this mixture of blood and origins was positioned as a disavowal of racial discrimination, racial prejudice and a testimony to harmonious race relations. Time and research however, have rendered another account, exposing the reality of the insidious racial inequality that has permeated the core of Brazilian history and social structure. Historian Thomas E. Skidmore's Black into White, a revisionist study of Brazilian race relations,

1

argues that the predominantly white elite within Brazilian society promoted racial democracy to obscure very real forms of racial oppression.1 Political scientist Michael Hanchard, equally has contended that the ideology of racial democracy, often promoted by state apparatuses, prevents effective action to combat racial discrimination by leading people to ascribe discrimination to other forms of oppression and allowing government officials charged with preventing racism to deny its existence a priori. 2 Yet the myth of racial democracy prevails as the most perdurable myth that has defined Brazil as a nation. My interest in this myth abides not entirely in its seeming perdurability but, rather its tenacious nexus, or collision between the practice or act of interracial sex and the imperatives of nation building. I am intrigued by where within the nation building project sexual coercion become romanticized and concomitantly mythologized into what Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his critical essay “Between Próspero e Caliban” has sardonically called a “harmonious reciprocal elision.” The fruit of this union, he informs us—the mulatto “contributed to against their will and own interests to legitimize racial and social inequality. To deracialize social relations, permitted colonialism and Brazilian politics to uncloak blame and to effectively produce social inequality” (Santos 20).3 Gerald Bender in his analysis of racial democracy and lusotropicalist rhetoric equally informs us that:

1

Skidmore, Thomas E. Brazil, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. 2 Hanchard, Micheal. Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 19451988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 3 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Entre Prospero e Caliban: Colonialismo, pós-colonialismo e inter-identidade.” Maria Irene Ramalho e António Sousa Ribeiro (eds.). Entre Ser e Estar: Raízes, Percursos e Discursos da Identidade. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2001.

2

The Portuguese colonizer, basically poor and humble, did not have the exploitive motivations of his counterpart from the more industrialized countries in Europe. Consequently, he immediately entered “into cordial relations” with non-European populations he met in the tropics. The ultimate proof of the absence of racism among the Portuguese, however, is found in Brazil, whose large and socially prominent mestiço population is living testimony to the freedom of social and sexual intercourse between Portuguese and non-Europeans… Finally, any prejudice or discrimination in territories formerly or presently governed by Portugal can be traced to class, but never colour, prejudice. (Bender 4-5).4 So, in essence interracial sex both physically and metaphorically was used as the very basis of the construction of Brazilian and Lusophone exceptionalism that essentially attributed all forms of perceived racial discrimination and oppression to questions of class. This mixture of blood and origins at the heart of this ostensibly unique form of democracy intimates a vexed history of race, power and domination. Interracial sex and its ostensible connotations functioned in the capacity of creating a discourse that systemically and rhetorically abnegated prejudice. While myths may be in most part ideological, the myth of racial democracy beseeches us to examine the physicality of myth, and precisely the bodies lay hidden therein. For we can ascertain that the life, sustenance and perpetuation of this myth , hailing miscegenation at its core, rendering varied shades, textures and castes of difference, lies at the feet of the ideological embodied. Narrative of Intimacy and Intimacy in the Narrative Within the vexed interstices of the myth of racial democracy abides the central question of intimacy. Intimacy is defined as: “belonging to or characterizing one's deepest nature; marked by very close association, contact, or familiarity; marked by a warm friendship developing through long association; of a very personal or private nature.”5 The myth of racial democracy

4

Bender, J. Gerald. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, Univ. of California, 1978. Intimate." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. . 5

3

and lusotropicalist rhetoric renders a curious and concomitant politicization and porno-troping of intimacy, where by the idea of sex, or rape, was not merely an act of pleasure or pain but a political/racial avowal. In other words, though this myth may indeed appear unequivocally racialized and indeed gendered, its politicization and concomitant nationalization functioned as a concrete means through which to obscure those very intersections. The long prevailing notions that have attached sexual intercourse to the idea of intimacy were effectively employed as a political tool of subjugation. Whereas the British and United States outwardly depicted these “deviant encounters” with disdain, though its practice was equally as prevalent as evidenced in the Anglophone miscegenated populations, the Portuguese colonizer and the subsequent Brazilian slave master delighted in them as a veritable testament to sexual prowess, and thereby solidifying his hetero-normativity. Gerald Bender has adroitly pointed out that “Freyre turned the country's [Brazil] inferiority complex inside out and converted Brazil's multiracial past from a liability into an asset. ... They no longer needed to see scandal and shame in their racial mixture; instead they could look to their art, literature, music, dance, in short to their culture to discover a richness and a vitality that were a result of the fusion of races and civilizations” ( Bender 5). I am suggesting that within this myth, the racial and sexual function as tandem narratives by which the sexual as national narrative and imperative ossifies the racial/social position of Afro-Brazilian women, and by extension Afro-Brazilian men. The Portuguese and subsequently the Brazilians subverted this narrative and used it as means of consciously legitimizing sexual coercion and its bedfellow racial inequality. Unlike the black female body of the United States

4

the Brazilian black female body does not serve as a source of shame for having crossed the color-line but its very justification.6 The narrative of intimacy within this myth fettered Afro-Brazilian women to a perpetual “economy of use,” where by their use in the construction of white male sexual pleasure/ supremacy solidified and avowed their place within the national narrative. This mythological structure rendered an utter repudiation or divestment of black women’s lot as slave or property. It is crucial to underscore here that this “economy of use” and porno-troping of intimacy ascribed black women a false sense of bodily agency and by extension political agency in which her violation was refashioned within national myth as an exercise of consent. This myth was used successfully to placate the masses through the ruses of monstrous intimacies. For as Homi Bahbha adroitly notes: The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference-racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, desire and power. (Bhabha 67) 7 Regarding the racial democracy with a closer optic will reveal an apparent erasure. Within this racial hetero-normative myth there exists a conscious erasure of the black male body. Through the nationalization of black female sexual coercion, black men are also instructed to believe that they too participate through the use of the black female body as collective signifier which comes to stand theoretically as a collective racial body.

6

Freyre also documents quite extensively that the mulata was often the young white slave child’s first female partner. The “right of passage” or the construction of white Brazilian masculinity was a process through which his sexual and racial position were established through the domination of the black female body. Thus, racial supremacy and sexual supremacy are both mutually informing and mutually constitutive. 7 Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 2004; 1994.

5

Within the context of the United States, interracial sex was used as a material means of outwardly disavowing black agency corporally and politically (both for women and men). In the Brazilian context, in the romanticization of sexual coercion as national narrative the black subject is beguiled into a false sense of belonging to that narrative, precisely because it maintains a degree of visibility through its use in the construction. What persists as a challenge for the black body is the revelation that this “use” or positioning within the national narrative is the very conduit of its erasure. “Dissident Desires: Race, Sex and Abolition in 19th Century Brazilian Literature” will examine reverse representations of interracial sex between black men and white partners to examine the tenability of this myth for the black male body in the imagining of the nation. By excavating the black body from the confines of miscegenation discourse, “Dissident Desires” explores the role of sex in the formation and representation of the black male subject. Privileging the theoretical framework of intersectionality, this dissertation engages critical race theory and psychoanalytic theory to foreground a theorization of black sexuality in 19th century Brazilian literature. I examine representations of national “reverse miscegenation anxieties” (sex between black men and white partners) to argue that these anxieties not merely complicate and frame the discussion on the abolition of slavery, but the consequent constructions and limitations of black freedom in the national context. This dissertation expands understanding of how discourse surrounding black sexuality determines the inclusion and simultaneous exclusion of the black body from the national narrative. In theorizing the black body in pre and post abolitionist literature and rhetoric I return to it as Charles Johnson in A Phenomenology of the Black Body suggests “as the radix for interpreting racial experience. It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as 6

a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body’s “racial” experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the ‘raced’ white body” ( Johnson 20).8 By focusing on the black male body I wish do not to silence the black female subject, rather to recover an oft neglected, recondite and seemingly under- analyzed dimension of Brazilian national racial mythology. As I will examine in the pages that follow, the political and material place of the black female body is a specter of the black male body within the imperatives of miscegenation myth. The place of the black female body in the sexual/ racial economy of use not only haunts the black male body, but foregrounds and articulates its nonplace in the imagining of the nation. This project aligns itself with literary critic Darieck Scott’s charge to foreground an examination of abjection and black maleness to explore its place in the production of black subjectivity and the nation imaginary: I think that focusing on the more counterintuitive association between black maleness and abjection-which is also, as so much of our history indicates, the more fiercely resisted association- is, for this project, more politically useful, or at least somewhat less for this project, more politically useful, or at the very least somewhat less hazardous to our common political struggles. To ferret out and disclose abjection in case of black maleness reveals the abject which is- of course- part of masculinity per se, but which is rejected (objected) and cast out under the names of femininity and of blackness. To focus on the abject in its relation to black women easily might appear to be a confirmation of the defeat with which abjection works rather than a complication of it. (Scott 16) 9 With this absence we might perceive that the politicization of interracial sex at the helm of the Brazilian national narrative ostensibly gives visibility to and paradoxically renders continuity to the legacy of white male sexual/ physical domination of the black female body. As we will

8

Johnson, Charles. “A Phenomenology of the Black Body.” Michigan QuarterlyReview 32(4).595, 1999. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination New York: New York University Press, 2010. 9

7

see, the black male body is antithetical to the idea of racial democracy. This antithesis is evinced through the black male body’s absence from this sexual-racial mythology and the historical violence which sustained its non-duplicity. As such, the black male body, as I will demonstrate, and its ability to reproduce has obdurately presented a menace to the construction and the solidification of white male supremacy in the wake of abolition. As I will underscore, the myth or mythology constructed upon or through the body are indeed the most obstinate, as the sustenance of racialized mythologies foments a dialectic of regeneration, in which the regeneration of bodies (re)produces the visibility and perdurability of myth. In his essay Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body George Yancy envisions the body as the site at which the historical narrative is given form and configured: The body’s meaning – whether phenotypically white or black- its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its “raciated” reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is “seen”, its truth, is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. “The body” is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its “ being” as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/ reconfiguration. (Yancy 23)10 In regarding the body’s place in the articulation of historical narrative, this project concerns itself with two key components: the inscription of black bodies and ostensible manifestations of black resistance through sexuality. In this sense, I am interested in how black subjects within the power and gender limitations of slavery and post-abolition attempt to contest and challenge the mastery of the white gaze through the representation of their bodies.

10

Yancy, George. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body. “The Journal of Speculative Philosophy,” New Series, 19 (4), 230- 2005.

8

The paucity of the slave narrative in Brazil prevents us from discerning the actual words of slaves and presents an unprecedented challenge to understanding the narrative of the enslaved Afro-Brazilian. I believe that in our analyses of black bodies in Brazilian literature we have too often focused on the exterior or exteriority of the black body’s suffering and neglected to query what those external acts of disavowal and abnegation might tell us about the interiority, or the inner lives of the enslaved. I am precisely interested in how through the exteriority of representations of the black body and sexualities we might arrive at the inner life of the black subject and discern a potential narrative of black political desire. As such, my dissertation responds to this elision, by regarding sex as not merely an act of pleasure or violence, but politically discursive. By purposefully challenging the treatment of the black sexuality as mere consequence or casualty of institution, my project provides necessary tools to interrogate how black bodies and sexualities are utilized, scripted, narrated in 19th century Brazilian literature. “Dissident Desires” works primarily with nineteenth century Naturalist/Abolitionist texts. I have chosen this period because I am interested in precisely how Brazilian independence and slave emancipation shaped the representation of black bodies in literature, and how this period provides a critical optic through which to analyze the literal and literary formation of black sexuality and body within the national narrative. The abolitionist text in this project is not defined solely as literature written by abolitionists proper, or period works that depict slave emancipation as a political question, but more preceisly, writing that evidences a particular preoccupation with the movement, both its implications and repercussions for the black body. The Naturalist/Abolitionist text purposefully 9

juxtaposes the body’s materiality vis-à-vis the question of human desire—rendering a critical meditation on black subjectivity and its relation to a larger, political, national/ historical body. By engaging the Abolitionist/Naturalist literature, my project examines the role of desire in the creation and maintenance of racialized structural and systemic inequality. I underscore that the gendered and racialized representations of black subjectivity in texts are not temporally static, but hold evolving ramifications and new economies of domination and representation for black bodies at the center of these texts.

In chapter one, “Evicting the Black Body: Domestic Allegory of Interracial Desire” I provide an analysis of Artur de Azevedo and Urbano Duarte’s O Escravocrata [The Slavocrat]. In this chapter I demonstrate how national reverse miscegenation anxieties are linked to domestic space and how this linkage is deployed to articulate the black male body’s non-place within the nation. Here I examine how the conflation of interracial sex and revenge renders a politicization of black male sexual desire. I show how through conscious acts of desire, the black male purposefully contests and undermines the physical and racial stratification of the Brazilian slave regime. Chapter two, “Desire Disavowed: Critical Re-membrance, Belonging and the Abject Pornography of Torture,” offers an examination of Aluísio Azevedo’s chef d’oeuvre, O Mulato [The Mulatto]. This chapter places Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in conversation with Freud and Lacan’s theorizations of the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal. I examine a little analyzed scene: the torture of Domingas, the main protagonist’s mother, to argue that the black female subject’s physical and psychic abjection within the institution of slavery frames black male subjectivity and freedom within the national narrative. The representation of “reverse 10

miscegenation anxieties” in Azevedo’s O Mulato are also placed in conversation with North American racial historiography to reveal the insidious commonalities and differences of the abjection of black bodies throughout the Atlantic. Chapter three, “Predatory Perversions: Same-Sex Desire Prostitution and the Emancipation Body” offers an analysis of Adolfo Caminha’s Bom Crioulo and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl. This chapter commences with an examination of a 17th century court case in which a black male slave accuses his master of rape before the Portuguese Inquisition. This case is used as vehicle through which to examine interracial same-sex desire and intra-gender violence and its dialectic with the notions of freedom and emancipation. In my allegorical reading of Caminha’s Bom Crioulo, I work against the romance’s Gay canonization to make the case that its deployment of homosexuality, rape, and prostitution are used as tropes by which to examine black male pre/post abolition desire vis-à-vis slave emancipation and the conception of national identity in the wake of Brazilian independence. Lastly, “Dissident Desires: Race, Sex and Abolition in 19th Century Brazilian Literature” has as its premise that through an exploration of the centrality of sex and racial desire in the construction of black subjectivity, we can arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of their use as devices in national myth-making. From this perspective, my project inserts black sexuality into critical discussions of Brazilian national identity, by returning to the black body not as a site of subjection or objectification, but as a critical terrain of inquiry.

11

Chapter One Evicting the Black Body: Domestic Allegory of Interracial Desire in Artur de Azevedo and Urbano Duarte’s O Escravocrata Strangers' faces held no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. — James A. Baldwin , Another Country. They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces. ― Richard Wright, Native Son. Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust. — Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom. Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning. ― Richard Wright, Black Boy.

Framing Abolition On May 13, 1888 Princess Isabel signed the Lei Áurea [The Golden Law], abolishing slavery throughout Brazil. However, the road leading up to this momentous occasion was one wracked with insidious contradiction, ardent opposition and a great degree of ambivalence. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain under pressure from humanitarian and liberal groups had abolished the slave trade—soon followed by France (incited by the victory of the Haitian revolution, creating the first ever black republic). The United States followed suit with the triumph of the North over the South and Cuba in 1886. Still, despite the decision of its neighbors, Brazil remained as the sole country to maintain slavery in the western hemisphere. In 1817, Britain had with little success put pressure on the Portuguese government to end the slave trade. However, Britain persisted, demanding that Brazil abolish slavery in return for Brazil’s recognition as a newly independent nation.

12

Historian Thomas E. Skidmore points out that opposition to slavery took a long time to become a political force in Brazil.11This disinterest or ambivalence can be attributed to the fact that slavery remained an integral part of the Brazilian economy. Slaves were used in large numbers on the sugar plantations of the northeastern region and the coffee plantations in the southeast. In underscoring the prevalent role of slavery in Brazilian society and economy abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco proffers: Toda a nosssa existência social é alimentada por esse crime: crescemos sobre ele, é a base de nossa sociedade. Nossa fortuna donde vem? De nossa produção escrava. Suprimi hoje a escravidão, tereis suprimido o país. Eis como a lei moral reage. Nossa liberdade fez-nos escolher o caminho do crime, seguimo-lo: hoje que queremos dele sair estamos a ele pregados. Está esboçado o quadro geral das afinidades de cada elo de nossa sociedade com a escravidão: ela tudo corrompeu, a começar pelo povo a que roubou as virtudes dos povos que trabalham: a diligência, a economia, a caridade, o patriotismo, o desprezo da morte, o amor da liberdade.(Nabuco 6)12 [All of our social existence is fed by this crime: we grow up on it; it is the very foundation of our society. Where does our wealth come from? From our slave production. If you support slavery you will further oppress the country. This is the nature of moral law. Our liberty has made us choose the path of crime, we follow it: today what we want is to get out, but we are attached to it. Every part of society has been tarnished by slavery: it corrupted everything, starting with the people from whom it stole the virtue of those that labor: the diligence, the economy, charity, patriotism, the disdain for death and the love of liberty.]13 In response to abolitionists’ criticisms of Brazilian slavery, José de Alencar, Brazilian writer and politician, advocating in one of his letters for the maintenance of slavery in Brazil, illustrates quite sardonically what he envisions as the contradictory nature of the abolitionist: “o filantropo europeu, entre a fumaça do bom tabaco de Havana e da taça do bom café do Brasil, se enleva em suas utopias humanitárias e arroja contra estes países uma aluvião de injúrias pelo ato de manterem trabalho servil. Mas por que não repele o moralista com asco estes frutos do braço 11

Skidmore, Thomas E. Brazil, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. 12 Nabuco, Joaquim, Izabel Andrade Marson, and Celio Ricardo Tasinafo. O Abolicionismo. Brasilia: Fundação Universidade de Brasília, 2003; 1883. 13 All English translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

13

africano?”(Alencar 89)14[ The European philanthropist, between the smoke of the fine tobacco of Havana and a good cup of Brazilian coffee gets caught up in his humanitarian utopia and hurls at these countries a great deal of insults for maintaining slave labor . But why don’t these moralists reject with disgust the fruit of African labor?] Few voices dared to stand out to call for gradual abolition. Among them was José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva in 1825. Not surprisingly, not many took notice and the Brazilian slave trade continued at an alarmingly high rate until its insolvency in 1850. In 1866 a group of French abolitionists and intellectuals appealed to Emperor Pedro II to use his power to put an end to slavery. He responded by making the first governmental pledge promising that upon the culmination of Paraguayan war he would consider the abolition of slavery. In 1871 Viscount Rio Branco proposed the Lei de Ventre Livre [The Law of the Free Womb], by which children born of slave mothers would be free upon reaching the age of majority. The law additionally proposed that slaves could buy their freedom. However, this bill proved particularly less effective than advocates had desired, because if the master did not wish to recognize the government’s indemnity payment for the child at age eight, he still had the option of retaining the “freeborn” child under his authority-i.e., in de facto slavery- until the age of twenty one. Additionally, many fazendeiros [land owners] in league with parish priests, continued to register new born black slaves with an earlier date of birth. In 1879, Joaquim Nabuco entered Brazilian parliament as deputy for the province of Pernambuco, and subsequently became the leader of the bourgeoning abolitionist movement. In one of the first manifestos written for the Sociedade Contra Escrividão [Anti-Slavery Society] he 14

Alencar, José Martiniano de. Cartas a favor da escravidão / Alencar ; organização, Tâmis Parron. São Paulo: Hedra, 2008.

14

declares: “Brazil does not want to be a nation morally isolated, a leper expelled from the world community. The esteem and respect of foreign nations are as valuable to us they are other peoples….Social morality doesn’t have to wait for us …To isolate oneself is to condemn oneself” (Nabuco 18-19). In the wake of Brazilian independence, foreign opinion had fueled abolitionist and antislavery rhetoric and debate. The abolitionists, as well as much of the literature they produced during this period, championed emancipation with the primary preoccupation being Brazil’s national image vis-à-vis the international community, than the belief in the equality of the slave or afro-descendent. Abolitionist Writing In Nabuco’s seminal anti-slavery text O Abolicionismo [Abolition] published 1883, he focuses increasingly on what he views as the ethical and spiritual degradation that occurred under Brazilian slavery. He envisages this degradation as one that is equally as disparaging for the master and slave, ultimately distorting and corrupting the very foundation of national morality: A escravidão é como um desses venenos que se infiltram pelo perfume: ela se infiltra pelo egoísmo. Depois de se haver introduzido na sociedade e de ter alimentado uma raça à custa da outra ela corrompe a ambas. Duas palavras únicas temos a dizer a respeito: que vícios não deve ter uma alma que obedece, que está sempre curva e humilde, que rasteja diante de um homem? Que às vezes é a encarnação de todos os crimes? Que vícios por outro lado não deve ter aquela que está habituada a ser mandada a castigar a homens como a animais, a contemplar a máxima degradação da nossa natureza, a satisfazer brutalmente a todos seus caprichos? Nada há mais parecido com a alma de um senhor como a de um escravo. Quereis ver o paralelo? Considerando sempre perante o ideal da justiça, o que é mais degradadante-a baixeza deste ou a altivez daquele? O que fica deprimido num cresce no outro: são duas molas, uma desce quando a outra sobe: a um vício corresponde outro, os extremos tocam-se.

15

Da moral, a escravidão fez duas morais; uma para cada classe (...) Do trabalho, o mais nobre dos esforços, fez ela a mais rebaixada das ocupações ; atividade que trazia em seu proprio arbítrio caráter da liberdade tornou-se, na sociedade, servil, como se a sociedade fosse outra mais que o meio do desenvolvimento das atividades livres. (...) A virtude perdese ao contato dessa instituição: ela é escola do crime,envenena o coração do senhor e do escravo, muda a caridade em palavra vã, desnatura a lei do mérito: é a sentina de todos os vícios. (Nabuco 3-4) [Slavery is like one of those venoms that infiltrate aromatically: it infiltrates through greed. After having been introduced into a society and sustained one race at the cost of another, it corrupts both. There are but two words to say in this regard: what defects does the obedient soul not carry, that is always humble and deferent, that drags in front of man? That is often the incarnation of all crimes? What defects, on the other hand, does that soul accustomed to being ordered to punish humans like animals not have, contemplating the maximum degradation of our nature, brutally satisfying all of its caprices? Nothing is more similar to the soul of a master than the soul of a slave. Care to see the parallel? Keeping in consideration, as always, the ideal of justice, what is more degraded – the baseness of the latter, or the haughtiness of the former? What decreases in one, increases in the other: they are two springs, one lowers when the other rises, to one defect corresponds the other, the poles touch one another. Of morality, slavery made two moralities; one for each class (...) Of work, the most noble of efforts, slavery transformed it into the basest of occupations; an activity that brought with it the character of liberty which became, in society, servile, as if society was something other than a medium to develop free activity. (...) Virtue is lost upon contact with that institution: it is the school of crime, poisoning the soul of the master and of the slave, emptying the word caritas of its meaning, corroding the law of merit: it is the sentinel of all defects.] Employing what I would delineate as a dialectic of the senses, Nabuco’s writing focuses quite extensively on the sensorial effects of slavery. Here Nabuco argues vehemently against slavery on both moral and religious grounds, likening slavery to self-consuming vice and venom. Nabuco expresses particular concern with the idea that slavery as an institution brought blacks and whites into physical contact, and that this contact further propagated human perversion through despotic abuses of power suffered by a brutalized subaltern at the hand of an allpowerful master class. For Nabuco this perverse interplay ultimately corrodes the very heart of the domestic-national sphere.

16

. Upon closer examination of Nabuco’s writing, one is immediately confronted with the absence of race or racial prejudice in his construction of the master/ slave dialectic. Nabuco’s writing curiously attacks the institution proper, ostensibly racialized, that has as its foundation the inherent belief in the inferiority of the black body, yet makes no mention of its unequivocally racialized dynamic. Through the erasure of race from the master/slave dialectic in Nabuco’s writing, we bear witness to the articulation of the exceptionalist rhetoric of Brazilian slavery. As Nabuco is later quoted as saying: “slavery, to our good fortune, never embittered the slave’s spirit toward the master, at least collectively, nor did it create between the races that mutual hate which naturally exists between oppressors and oppressed…color in Brazil is not, as in the United States, a social prejudice against whose persistence no character, talent, or merit can prevail.” (Nabuco 23) Race, for Nabuco and period abolitionists was to be considered both a social and physical condition. Bourgeoning whitening discourse posited that whiteness was not merely a physiological fact, but a social reality or social statue to be achieved by great effort. Nabuco, like many of the Brazilian elite were invested in the belief in the exceptionalism of Brazilian slavery, colonization and race relations. They zealously espoused the belief that the Portuguese colonizers and subsequent Brazilian slave masters were more genteel, more humane toward black slaves than their American counterparts. For Nabuco, one could aver that the construction of master- slave relations in the Brazilian context is not a racialized dynamic, but rather an example of a slavery without (rac)ism.

17

Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his critical essay “Entre Próspero e Caliban” understands this hallmark of luso-tropicalist rhetoric as “different type of racism:” “É a afirmação do branco e do negro no ponto de uma elisão recíproca. A miscigenação não é a consequência da ausência de racismo, como pretende a razão luso-colonialista ou luso-tropicalista, mas é certamente a causa de um racismo de tipo diferente”( Santos 13). [It is the affirmation that whites and blacks came together in a reciprocal elision. Miscegenation is not the consequence of absence of racism, as the luso-colonial or luso-tropical logic suggests, but it is certainly the cause of a different type of racism]. Race seemingly haunts Nabuco’s writing, yet, the racialist fundament of the master-slave dialectic is never made explicit. Comparatively, Brazilian abolitionist discourse stands in stark contrast to that of the United States where racial difference and its inherent violence were at the very center of the debate. Curiously unlike in the Unites States, abolitionists in Brazil were seldom forced to discuss the question of race, as the advocates of slavery almost never resorted to theories of racial inferiority. What is less decipherable in Nabuco’s abolitionist writing is in fact race as both a material fact and concomitant condition is to be overcome by the physical separation of the races, or the erasure of the implicit black body in his writing. This different type of racism fueled abolitionist literature, presenting an unprecedented paradox to be uncovered around the bodies upon which slavery was built. Abolitionists and Abolition in Literature The black body in Brazilian literature prior to 1850 that is prior to the end of the slave trade is virtually non-existent. David Brookshaw has attributed its total absence from literature as an indication of the belief that the Brazilian writer did not consider the slave in any way a human 18

being (Brookshaw 27).15This paradoxical absence from literature and cultural production, also, I would suggest, intimates the black body’s non-place in the production of the national self. It is a small wonder, therefore, that when Abolitionist literature proper increased after the Lei do Ventre Livre [Law of Free Birth] in 1870 it was exceedingly racist in tone. Abolitionist literature, as witnessed in the writing of Nabuco, started from the premise that slavery was bad for slave owners, because it brought them into contact with degenerates. As it will be shown below, in representing the black body, abolitionists privileged easily recognizable stereotypes, thus easily betraying their deep-seated prejudice, and further aiding to entrench and perpetuate that prejudice in their readers. Undeniably, what they wrote, as Brookshaw affirms appeared in many cases to justify their bigotry. Sander Gilman in his reflections on the construction of the stereotype in national literature maintains: More complicated texts provide more complicated representations of difference. These texts may be complicated because they consciously form a fiction of the world. Such novels, plays, and poetry are written and marketed to fulfill certain needs of specific groups with a given society (…) Within the closed world they create, stereotypes can be studied as an idealized definition of the different. The closed world of language, a system of reference which creates the illusion of completeness and wholeness, carries and is carried by the need to stereotype. For stereotypes, like commonplaces carry entire realms of associations with them, associations that form a subtext within the world of fiction. In the case of works claiming to create a world out of whole cloth, such a subtext provides insight into the presuppositions of the culture in which the work arises and for which it is created. (Gilman 27)16 However, it is within this panoply of contradictions that they attempted to construct a discourse as David T. Haberly has delineated as both anti slavery and anti slave.17The essential character of Brazilian Abolitionism was defined by two existing forces: by the pull of the past—

15

Brookshaw, David. Race and Color in Brazilian Literature. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 17 Haberly, David T. “Abolitionism in Brazil: Anti-Slavery and Anti Slave”: in Luso-Brazilian Review, 9(2): (1972): 30-46. 16

19

the influence of the nation’s literary tradition, the influence of previous anti-slavery arguments, and above all, the deep-seated prejudices all white Brazilians shared; and by the imperatives of the present—the exigency to communicate with an audience either hostile or indifferent, thus capitalizing on their incessant concern about their slaves. Though Brazil possessed a large amount of slaves, even more than had been sent to the United States, the black body or presence remained virtually invisible in national literature. This curious omission clashes with numerous accounts of European travelers and paintings by French artists such as Edouard Manet , Jean Baptiste-Debret and Nicolas Antoine Taunay that depicted slavery and the black presence as an integral and quotidian part of 19th century Brazilian society. In the following Manet describes a portrait of the 19th century Brazilian slave body: Neste país os negros são escravos .Todos estes infelizes têm aspecto de animais...Os negros usam habitualmente calças, algumas vezes uma blusa de algodão, mas como escravos, não lhes é permitido calçar sapatos. As negras mostram-se, na maioria, nuas de cintura para cima; algumas trazem um pano de seda preso ao pescoço e caindo sobre o peito. São geralmente feias. Vi, contudo algumas bastante bonitas. Vestem-se com muito apuro. Uns trazem turbantes, outras arranjam artisticamente seus cabelos encarapinhados e quase todas usam saiotes enfeitados com imensos babados.( Figari 275)18 [In this country, blacks are slaves. All these unfortunate beings have the appearance of animals (...) They usually wear black pants, sometimes a cotton blouse, but as slaves, they are not allowed to wear shoes. Black women appear to be mostly naked from the waist up, some wear silk cloth attached to the neck and draped the chest. They are usually ugly. I saw some that were very beautiful however. Some dress up with great care. Some wear turbans, others artfully arrange and curl their hair and almost all wear skirts adorned with many 19 ruffles.]

18

Figari,Carlos. @utros Cariocas: Interpelações, experiências e identidades homoeróticas no Rio de Janeiro Séculos XVII ao XX. Belo Horizonte : Editora UFMG ; Rio de Janeiro : IUPERJ, 2007. 19 Translation mine.

20

20

21

20 21

Debret, Baptiste- Jean, Negra tatuada vendendo caju, 1827. Debret, Baptiste- Jean, Carregadores de caixas de açúcar, 1834-1839.

21

Though Brazilian abolitionist literature was not abundant it can be recognized in its production of several pejorative archetypes which Haberly defines as: the Pitiful Slave, the Immoral slave and the Violent Slave. Abolitionist discourse attempted to reconcile the inherent paradox of advocating for the abolition of a practice and institution that was founded and promulgated on the subjugation of black bodies, without necessarily positioning such bodies as equals, human beings, and much less citizens. In this regard, abolitionist literature attempted to make a stringent distinction between slavery as an institution and the black bodies that existed therein. The Pitiful Slave did achieve a particular degree of importance in Brazil—but solely when the character was closely tied to the specific concerns of the nation’s elite. White Brazilians, Haberly informs us, were exceedingly preoccupied with female slaves; “there were relatively few women in the senzalas, and their very low fertility was a major obstacle to the continuation of slavery” (Haberly 20). 22The Pitiful Slave, in most cases was a woman succumbed to suicide after having endured great torment and anguish. As the nineteenth century progressed, the archetype of the Pitiful Slave was transformed into the Immoral Slave and the Violent Slave. Bráulia, the mulata villainess in Pinheiro Guimarães História de uma Moça Rica (1861) [The Story of a Rich Girl], seduces and poisons as she conspires to destroy her white mistress. Other Immoral Slaves, however, were allowed some excuse for their transgressions. Carlota, the beautiful and intelligent mulata in Castro Alves' play Gonzaga, for example, almost single-

22

Haberly, David T. “Abolitionism in Brazil: Anti-Slavery and Anti Slave.”

22

handedly wipes out the Inconfidência Mineira.23 But the reasons behind her perfidy disclose a great deal about the racial attitudes of Brazil's most famous Abolitionist poet: Carlota helps the play's main villain because he has threatened to surrender her to the "mais repugnantes negros de minhas senzalas" [the most repugnant negros of the plantation] (Castro Alves 68).24 She is in turn brutally raped by one of the villain's blacks and commits suicide rather than live with her disgrace. Haberly has argued that the treatment of black female characters in abolitionist literature was “working towards a new definition of immorality, an immorality of availability rather than of character.” (Haberly 12) Implicit in the myth of the slave woman's hypersexuality in period literature, was her refusal of domestication and her supposed deviance from nuclear configurations of the family. The female slave's sexual agency continually surfaced, belying the hegemonic claim of its ostensible absence, and thus was quickly recast as inherently criminal. Its criminality theoretically lay in its subversion of notions of white domesticity via the seduction of the white master. All of the themes, stereotypes and prejudices inherent to Brazilian abolitionist literature were magisterially united by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo in As Vítimas Algozes (1869).Slavery, Macedo proclaimed in his preface to this collection of short novels, “first affected the slave of our homes and our plantations, the creature who was born a man but transformed, by captivity, into a plague, a wild beast"; the slave-beast then inevitably sought conscious or unconscious revenge. "If you consider these narratives carefully," Macedo warned his readers, "you must abolish slavery, lest they repeat themselves endlessly. For these stories are wholly true, and were

23

The Inconfidência Mineira or the Minas Gerais Conspiracy was an unsuccessful Brazilian independence movement. 24 Castro Alves, Antonio de. Obras Completas de Castro Alves. São Paulo.Companhia editora nacional, 1942.

23

and are and shall be forever-so long as you own slaves. Read, and you shall see!"(Macedo 120)25 And Brazilians read and believed these exaggerated accounts of the spoiled moleque who massacres the master's family26; of the mulata maid who instructs the innocent and virtuous governess unfathomable perversions and helps her own lover seduce the girl; of the witch-doctor who poisons the livestock, sets flame to the sugar cane, and persuades the cook to seduce the senhor and poison the senhora and her children.27 Among the writers of this period to express opposition to abolition was José de Alencar. Alencar, a Member of Parliament and Minister of Justice during the time of the abolitionist debates maintained a rather complex view of slavery. While Alencar was indeed an advocate for the preservation of slavery in Brazil, his actions often proved to be rather contradictory in nature. Alencar, in his position as Minister of Justice succeeded in closing the Valongo slave market in Rio de Janeiro—the city’s largest, yet argued vehemently that Brazil was not yet ready for the emancipation of the slave. Attributing the great part of Brazil’s economic growth and stability to slave labor, he maintained that it would be to Brazil’s detriment to emancipate the slave. Moreover, Alencar believed the abolitionist movement to be, to coin Roberto Schwarz, a set of ongoing ideias fora de lugar, or misplaced ideas.28 Alencar did not consider the abolitionist movement to be a fundamentally “national movement,” and severely criticized it for projecting foreign ideals upon a country that was founded upon and sustained by slave labor. In one his letters in support of slavery he states:

25

Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de. As Vitimas Algozes: quadros da escravidão. São Paulo: Editora Scipione, 1991. A more tamed version of this story also appears in José de Alencar’s 1870 play O Demônio Familiar. 27 A very similar tale is also appears in Coelho Netto’s 1870 romance Rei Negro. 28 Schwarz, Roberto, and John Gledson. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London; New York: Verso, 1992. 26

24

Se a raça Americana suportasse a escravidão, o tráfico não passara de acidente, e efêmero. Mas por uma lei misteriosa, essa grande família humana estava fatalmente condenada a desaparecer da face da terra, e não havia para encher esse vácuo senão a raça africana. Ao continente selvagem, o homem selvagem. Se este veio embrutecido pela barbaria, em compensação trouxe a energia para lutar com uma natureza gigante... Sem a escravidão africana e o tráfico que a realizou, a América seria ainda hoje um vasto deserto. A maior revolçado universo, depois do dilúvio, fora apenas uma descoberta geográfica, sem imediata importância. De certo não existiriam as duas grandes potências do novo mundo, os Estados Unidos e o Brasil. A brilhante civilização americana, sucessora da velha civilização européia, estaria por nascer. Eis um dos resultados benéficos do tráfico. Cumpre não esquecer, quando se trate desta questão importante, que a raça branca, embora reduzisse o africano à condição de uma mercadoria, nobilitou-o não só pelo contacto, como pela transfusão do homem civilizado. A futura civilização da África está aí, nesse fato em embrião. Se algum dia, como é de esperar, a civilização projetar-se pelo continente africano adentro, penetrando os povos da raça negra, a glória desse imenso acontecimento, amargue embora aos filantropros, caberá exclusivamente à escravidão. Foi ela que preparou os precursores negros da liberdade africana. (Alencar 69)29 [If Amerindians accepted slavery, the traffic would have been nothing more than an accident, and ephemeral. But due to a mysterious law, that great human family was fatally condemned to disappear from the face of the earth, and there would be no way to fill that void without the African race. To the savage continent, the savage man. If he became a brute due to his barbarism, to compensate, he brought the energy to fight great Mother Nature. Without slavery from Africa and the traffic that enabled it, America would still be a vast desert today. The greatest revolution of the universe, after the great floods, was a mere geographic discovery, of no immediate importance. Most certainly, two great powers of the new world would have never existed, the United States and Brazil. The brilliant American civilization, successor to the old civilization of Europe, would have never been born. Hence, a benevolent result of the slave trade. It is worth not forgetting, when dealing with this important question, that the white race, despite reducing the African to a commodity, ennobled him not only through contact, but also through the transfusion of the civilized man. The future civilization of Africa, is right here, in this embryonic fact. If someday, as expected, civilization bursts through the African continent, penetrating the peoples of the black race, the glory of this huge event, although it will embitter philanthropists will be thanks to slavery. It was slavery that prepared the precursors of African independence.] In examining Alencar’s letter several points reveal themselves: Alencar opposes the emancipation of the slave, as we have seen on the grounds that slave labor was fundamental to

29

Alencar, José Martiniano de. Cartas a favor da escravidão / Alencar ; organização, Tâmis Parron. São Paulo : Hedra, 2008.

25

the emergence of Brazil as an economic power, and that in fact it was destiny that the “savage African” from the “savage continent,” whose bodies were already accustomed to tropical weather to fill the void that was left by the preexisting Amerindian population. Alencar further suggests that the enslavement of African peoples was indeed an inevitable circumstance, and that the brutality of the middle passage bestowed upon the African the strength to work the Brazilian soil with unprecedented force. Here, Alencar positions the black body as what I would describe as a “national body,” in that its purpose is to be used exclusively in service to national profit and progress. He further asserts that even though the white race reduced black bodies to a market, it was for their benefit, as it was through the brutalization and debasement of their bodies that they acquired contact with the white race. This contact with the white race, tantamount to civilization, would eventually prove advantageous; as it would bestow upon the inhabitants of the future African post-colonies the knowledge to one day govern themselves. Unlike Nabuco, Alencar’s writing escapes the dialectic of sensorial corruption; rather, for Alencar the institution of slavery does not prove corruptive or pernicious neither for the slave nor the master, but essential and mutually beneficial. A close reading of Alencar will additionally unveil a conscious distancing, or disarticulation within himself and the black body. Alencar does not see blacks as equals, but underdeveloped, uncivilized bodies in evolution. He locates white man as paternal figure, axis of culture and proprietor of freedom, possessing the primordial right and exclusive privilege to determine and administer the destiny of the black body. Alencar’s writing posits blackness and black bodies as vestibular to culture, and civilization. Thus,

26

ultimately legitimate recognition of the black body within the national context is fettered to the idea of whiteness.30 O Escravocrata W. E. B. Dubois in his seminal text The Souls of Black Folk posed a question: “how does it feel to be a problem?” (Dubois 201)31 Dubois courageously gave words to the painful realities of living as a Black person in America. In this provocative query Dubois challenges the notion of black subjectivity as a problem or perpetual counter-narrative to the idea of nation. In this chapter, I wish to employ Dubois’ question to interrogate the black male body’s allegorical relationship to domestic space as a vehicle by which to examine its place in the construction of the 19th century Brazilian national narrative. According to James Clifford “allegory emphasizes the fact that realistic portraits [in the work], to the extent that they are ‘convincing’ or ‘rich,’ are extended metaphors, patterns or associations that point to coherent (theoretical, esthetic, moral) additional meanings” (Clifford 100).32 By privileging the “extended metaphors” that Clifford suggests, this chapter will examine the connubiality of the black body as problem— metonym of national disquiet, and its dialectic with domestic space. To this end, I am interested precisely in how within, this conflation of the domestic and the national that the black male slave body negotiates and challenges the

30

For a complete account of José de Alencar’s political and literary contributions see: Proença Manoel Calvalcanti. Jośe de Alencar na literatura brasileira.1966 and Menezes, Raimundo de. José de Alencar: literato e político. 1977. 31 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk; introduction by David Levering Lewis, New York: Modern Library, 2003. 32 Clifford, James. On Ethnographic Allegory in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

27

construction of race and raced power inherent to the slave regime.33 To this end, Foucault adumbrates that an understanding of power:

must not be sought in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the later are always local and unstable….Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And “Power,” insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and selfreproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement …power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (Foucault 93)34 With this in mind, I examine the construction of interracial sex between black slaves and white women and its vexed racial and political implications in Artur de Azevedo and Urbano Duarte’s O Escravocrata. For the mulatto, I will show how interracial sex is employed as a device or means of purposefully destabilizing racial institution. I suggest that interracial sex and reverse conception for the mulatto possesses the possibility of not merely subverting or troubling space, but also foregrounds a re-negotiation of body and subjectivity vis-à-vis the nation- family.

I regard the domestic as not merely a space that indeed mirrors nation, but an ideal, a space upon which collective racial desire is fashioned and projected. For as late literary critic Claudia Tate suggests the personal and the intimate place in relief larger social questions identity: “The personal is political”—reminds us, the seemingly most intimate details of private existence are actually structured by larger social relations. Hence the social equation between personal and political or private and public works in two directions: not only public and political

33

By employing the term “raced” as opposed to “racialized” power, I am suggesting that power in this context and its concomitant agency emerged in tandem with the construction of race. 34 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

28

social constructions shape the details of intimate lives; those personal details also form comprehensive social practices and institutions” (Tate 9).35 In his mediations on the 19th century family, Michel Foucault maintains that it should be fundamentally understood as a “network of pleasures and powers linked together at multiple points:”

Nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' society-and it is doubtless still with us-was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion. And this was not by way of hypocrisy, for nothing was more manifest and more prolix, or more manifestly taken over by discourses and institutions. Not because, having tried to erect too rigid or too general a barrier against sexuality, society succeeded only in giving rise to a whole perverse outbreak and a long pathology of the sexual instinct. At issue, rather, is the type of power it brought to bear on the body and on sex. In point of fact, this power had neither the form of the law, nor the effects of the taboo. On the contrary, it acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It did not seek to avoid it; it attracted its varieties by means of spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another. It did not set up a barrier; it provided places of maximum saturation. It produced and determined the sexual mosaic. Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse. (Foucault 47)36 Foucault establishes a connection between the sexual and erotic axiology of the 19th century and its individual articulation as inherently informed by institutional perversion. Sexuality not only functioned in the capacity of a means of self expression, but elaborated a signifier or grammar through which individuals could be classified. What is most important to underscore is that for Foucault sexuality in the 19th century is a political terrain in which individual desire and sexuality are in direct dialectic with performances of institutional power. Thus, perversity at the institutional level not only influences individual sexuality, but is a direct 35

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: the Black Heroine's Text at the turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 36 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality vol 1. An introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. French original 1976.

29

consequence. Fanon equally establishes a direct genealogy between the individual family and the production of white supremacy. He argues “the white family is the workshop in which one is shaped and trained for life in society. The family structure is internalized in the superego… and projected into political” (Fanon 149).37 Fanon and Foucault both maintain that the construction of race and sexuality and their concomitant anxieties are but direct consequences of their perpetual deployment as political devices. Individual bodies, desires and sexualities become not only fettered to the symbolic order, but the “acting upon” or expression of those very bodies, desires, and sexualities are perpetually in dialectic with their positon in a larger political narrative. Ultimately according to Fanon and Foucault, institutional perversion always presents itself as a specter in the life and actions of the individual. North American historian Martha E. Hodes has observed that individual sexual liaisons between white women and black men had a clear connection to the political, and therefore threatened racial slavery in a way that sex between white men and black women did not. (Hodes 4) 38 When white women had children with black men, two important social categories were eroded: racial categories were eroded because the children would be of mixed European and African ancestry, and categories of slavery and freedom were eroded because free people of African ancestry endangered the equation of blackness and slavery.39

37

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Hodes,Martha Elizabeth. White women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 39 Hodes argues that children born of black mothers and white fathers did not trouble racial categories, as all progeny received the legal statue of the mother. By having racial statue be determined matrilenally white men could maintain pervasive unchecked sex liaisons with slave women while concomitantly increasing their labor force. 38

30

Artur de Azevedo and Urbano Duarte’s O Escravocrata [The Slavocrat] written in 1884 just four years prior to the abolition of slavery, foregrounds a stark rupture with the abolitionist literary tradition. Published at the very height of abolitionist fervor, it relates the story of a household in which slavery reigns supreme. The family’s patriarch Salazar is a slavocrat, whose hatred of blacks and love of slavery is almost as ardent as his disdain for abolitionists. The household is composed of Gabriela, his wife, his two children: Gustavo and Carolina and his spinster sister, Juliana. However, hidden underneath this seemingly normal portrait of nineteenth century family life lies a secret that inevitably threatens domesticity and wreaks havoc upon each member of the family; Gustavo, the heir to Salazar’s slave empire is not his son, but rather the fruit of an adulterous union between his wife and his most despised slave, Lourenço. Azevedo and Duarte’s provocative decision to showcase female adultery with a black slave came at a cost and the play was not accepted by the Conservatório Dramático Brasileiro [The Brazilian Dramatic Conservatory]:

O Escravocrata, escrito há dois anos e submetido à aprovação do Conservatório Dramático Brasileiro sob o título A família Salazar, não mereceu o indispensável placet. Embora não trouxesse o manuscrito nota alguma com declaração dos motivos que ponderaram no ânimo dos ilustres censores, para induzi-los à condenação do nosso trabalho, somos levados a crer que essa mudez significa - ofensa à moral, visto como só nesse terreno legisla e prepondera a opinião literária daquela instituição.( Azevedo& Duarte 2)40 [O Escravocrata, written two years ago and submitted for approval to the Brazilian Conservatory of Drama under the title A Família Salazar, did not warrant the indispensable placet. Although the manuscript did not contain any declaration as to the motives of the illustrious censors, to push them toward refuting our work, we are led to believe that such a silence means – moral offense, since only in that field reigns the literary opinion of that institution.]41

40

Duarte, Urbano., Azevedo, Artur de. O Escravocrata,1884: http://www.biblio.com.br/defaultz.asp?link=http://www.biblio.com.br/conteudo/arturazevedo/oescravocata.html 3/3/11. 41 All translations of O Escravocrata are mine unless otherwise noted.

31

In response to the play’s harsh criticism of immorality and inverisimilitude Azevedo and Duarte daringly query: “onde é que se acha o imoral ou o inverossímil? As relações amorosas entre senhores e escravos foram e são, desgraçadamente, fatos comuns no nosso odioso regime social; só se surpreenderá deles quem tiver olhos para não ver e ouvidos para não ouvir.(3) [Where do you find the immoral or the improbable? Amorous affairs between masters and slaves was and is, unfortunately, common events in our hateful social regime, only to surprise those who have eyes not to see and ears not to hear.]

The authors of this piece make clear that both reverse interracial sexual relations (black men and white women) and female adultery are common realities that exist in Brazilian society. This work’s rejection by the National Conservatory is indicative of a society that ostensibly wanted to ignore these liaisons—quietly pushing them under the rug. However, much like his brother Aluísio Azevedo, to be discussed in chapter two, Arthur Azevedo and his co-author Urbano Duarte chose to reverse the miscegenation equation, deploying consensual, albeit illicit, interracial sex between a married white woman of noble societal standing and a mulatto slave. O Escravocrata’s avant la lettre plot opens the possibility of interracial sex and intimacy as potential political devices to undermine the institution of Brazilian slavery, placing in relief the construction of national hetero-normative racialist self-perception vis-à-vis the reality with which it collides. As such, Duarte and Azevedo make explicit that these national “dirty little secrets” should no longer be bequeathed with silence and denial, but indeed to be exposed in the “supremo tribunal de justice—o teatro”[the supreme court of justice-the theater]. They further add: “seria muito bom que todas as mulheres casadas fossem fiéis aos seus maridos, honestas, ajuizadas, linfáticas, e que os adultérios infamantes não passassem de fantasias perversas de dramaturgos atrabiliários; mas infelizmente assim não sucede, e o bípede implume comete todos 32

os dias monstruosidades que não podem deixar de ser processadas neste supremo tribunal de justiça - o teatro.” (3) [It would be nice if all married women were faithful to their husbands, honest, wise, lymphatic, and the infamous adulteries were but perverse fantasies of playwrights splenetic, but unfortunately this is not the case, and every day the callow biped commits monstrosities that cannot cease being tried in this court of supreme justice – the theater.] The theater as both a discursive and visual medium emerges as a critical place or terrain of articulation and laying bare of national myth and anxiety. The lucid confrontational nature of the spectacle renders these boiling, insidious contractions not a mere piece of literature to be consumed and interpreted in the privacy of the domestic, but indeed public and unambiguously visible, charging audiences to bear witness to the concrete realities that they selectively disregard. Further in the prologue, the authors make explicit that the play’s objective is to raise national consciousness and dutifully insert this work within the abolitionist project: Não queremos mal ao Conservatório; reconhecemos o seu direito, e curvamos a cabeça. Tanto mais que nos achamos plenamente convencidos de que, à força de empenhos e de argumentos, alcançaríamos a felicidade de ver o nosso drama à luz da ribalta. Mas esses trâmites seriam tão demorados, e a idéia abolicionista caminha com desassombro tal, que talvez no dia da primeira representação do Escravocrata já não houvesse escravos no Brasil. A nossa peça deixaria de ser um trabalho audacioso de propaganda, para ser uma medíocre especulação literária.(5) [We wish no harm upon the Conservatory, we recognize its rights, and we lower our heads. Especially as we find ourselves fully convinced that the strength of commitments and arguments could accomplish the happiness of seeing our play in the spotlight. But these proceedings would be so time consuming, and the abolitionist movement has progressed so that, perhaps on the day of the opening night there would no longer be slaves in Brazil. Our play would cease to be an audacious work of propaganda, in favor of being one of mediocre literary speculation.]

33

In the opening scene of O Escravocrata Salazar is found speaking to his colleague and business partner, Sebastião, professing his profound hatred of slaves. He soon in turn directs his hatred toward his other archnemesis: the abolitionist: SEBASTIÃO - De acordo, mas hoje anda aí em moda tratá-los bem... com humanidade... não sei que mais... SALAZAR - Tolices! Humanidade para negro! Para moléstia de negro há um remédio supremo, infalível e único: o bacalhau. Deem-me um negro moribundo e um bacalhau, que eu lhes mostrarei se o não ponho lépido e lampeiro com meia dúzia de lambadas! SEBASTIÃO - Perfeitamente de acordo. Mas, quer queiramos, quer não, temos de contemporizar com essas idéias... Os tais senhores abolicionistas... SEBASTIÃO- E com que desprezo nos chamam de escravocratas! Dizem que negociamos em carne humana, quando são eles que traficam com a boa-fé dos papalvos, e lhes vão limpando as algibeiras, por meio de discursos e conferências! SALAZAR - Exploram o elemento servil pelo avesso, sem os percalços do ofício. Ao menos nós damos aos negros casa, cama, comida, roupa, botica e bacalhau.(5) [SEBASTIÃO - Agreed, but today they go about treating them well ... with humanity ... and I don’t know what else... SALAZAR – Nonsense! Humanity for a nigger! For that pest there’s only one infallible cure: the bacalhau. Give me a dying nigger and a bacalhau42, and see won’t I make him nimble with half a dozen lashes! SEBASTIÃO – But like it or not, we must compromise with the ideas ... of those damned abolitionists SEBASTIÃO- And with such contempt they call us slave drivers! They say that we deal in human flesh, when they are the ones that traffic the good faith of simpletons, and wiping their pockets clean, through speeches and conferences!]

Salazar and Sebastião’s discourse is seemingly emblematic of national pro-slavery and pervasive paternalistic and racist attitudes toward slavery, as he likens the slave trade to the abolitionist campaign. By positioning the black body as antithetical to humanness and as a

42

The bacalhau was an instrument of torture used by Brazilian slave masters to punish their slaves.

34

“moléstia,” or problem to be remedied by violence, they further reproduce national pathological views of black body. Frantz Fanon notes: The Black man is the symbol of Evil (…) The torturer is the Black man, Satan is Black, one talks of shadows, when one is dirty one is black—whether one is thinking of physical dirtiness or moral dirtiness. It would be astonishing, if the trouble were taken to bring them all together, to see the vast number of expressions that make the Black man the equivalent of sin, whether concretely or symbolically, the Black man stands for the bad side of the character. As long as one cannot understand this fact, one is doomed to talk in circles about the “ black problem” Blackness, darkness, shadow, shades, night , the labyrinths of the earth, abysmal depths, blacken someone’s reputation ;on the other side, the bright look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly light. (Fanon 30)43 This primal scene equally reveals the incestuous nature of slavery establishing a tenacious coalescence of paternity, punishment and dependence. Salazar, as both slave master and proprietor inserts himself as both father and concomitant racial Other. Azevedo and Duarte construct a coalescence of institution, violence and paternalism as they show how the slave is perpetually fettered to an “economy of use” both virtual and real, in which their bodies are used not only in service, but to signify and ossify the racial position of the other. In the following, Simone de Beauvoir critically underscores the relationship of violence between colonial-patriarchal government and the racialized subject in what she delineates as the serious. Dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and the freedom of other, to such an extent that sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that what he sacrifices is nothing. The colonial administrator who has raised the highway to the stature of an idol will have no scruple about assuring its construction at the price of a great number of lives of the natives; for, what value has the life of a native who is incompetent, lazy, and clumsy when it comes to building highways? The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is the fanaticism of Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose

43

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks.

35

a credo, that is, an internal movement, by means of external constraints. It is fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings. (Beauvoir 49-50)44

In Beauvoir’s theorization of the serious the oppression of the subaltern is both justified and refashioned within the imperatives of national greed to signify a form of assistance. The incestuous violent nature of this scene, as I will later discuss, abides in Salazar’s own miscegenated past. He projects his vehement hatred of his own origins (great grandson of a mulatto slave) onto the abolitionist movement that threatens to undermine his power and concomitantly destabilize his own self constructed narrative of whiteness. For as George Yancy reminds us “whiteness is a way of performing both one’s phenotypic white body and one’s subjectivity as structured through a specific white racist epistemic orientation” (Yancy 48).45So, in a sense, Salazar, by dominating and rendering the black body submissive, he attempts to not only resignify his past, but gain autonomy over it. For Foucault, docility is achieved through the actions of discipline. He posits discipline as different from force or violence because it is a way of controlling the operations and positions of the body.

46

In the same way in which Salazar revels in forcing the slave to submit to the

whip, he too submits to the very institution that he upholds and the origins that he secretes. This association of dependence and paternal kinship is not gratuitous but cogently affirms as Gilman contends “because the Other is the antithesis of the self, the definition of the Other must incorporate the basic categories of which the self is defined” (Gilman 23).47

44

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity, New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1976. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. 46 Foucault , Michel.'The subject and power' in Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Vol three. Edited by James Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press.Original article published 1982. 47 Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. 45

36

So, it must be understood that the edifice of the national self is indelibly an “imagining” or idealization linked to espoused systemic, institutionalized manifestations and performances of national power.48 Therefore, within the confines of slavery to concretize the antithetical dialectic of master and slave, “the father” must necessarily be white, so that the black body may be accordingly rendered infantile, submissive and powerless.49 This connection or conflation between slave master and father is paradoxical as this further accentuates a tenuous relationship of notion of kinship and family. Azevedo and Duarte, despite the play’s overt abolitionist posture, do not entirely glorify the movement, but intently expose its multiple hidden pitfalls, evidencing a particular preoccupation and disquiet for the members’ supposititious engagement and varying hidden agendas. This rather stark criticism of the movement is well founded, as historically many envisaged the emancipation cause as a social medium, an ephemeral cause that very few took seriously. This fallacy is embodied in the personage of Serafim, who belongs to a local carioca abolitionist club. Upon running into financial difficulties, Serafim quickly abandons the movement and takes up work with Salazar as a slave trafficker. Conversely, the positive attributes of the abolitionist movement are embodied, in Salazar’s daughter Carolina’s abolitionist and intellectual fiancé, Doutor, who despite Salazar’s involvement and great passion

48

In terms that are useful to consider, Foucault proffers: “Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization: as the process which, through ceaseless struggle and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or even reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.” (Foucault 93) 49 Within a patriarchal society the figure of authority must be male. In the nineteenth century the father was the symbol of authority. As children were lawfully seen as the ‘property’ of their parents and were also under their strict command, the black slave was inserted in this rhetoric under the institution of slavery. Thus, the slave was considered to be both property, and child of the master.

37

for the institution of slavery seeks Carolina’s hand in marriage. In the following quote he makes evident his abolitionist sentiment:

DOUTOR - Sim. Se bem que não apresente como paladino, faço modestamente tudo quanto posso pela causa da emancipação dos escravos. (Pausa.) Estou perfeitamente convicto de que a escravidão é a maior das iniquidades sociais, absolutamente incompatível com os princípios em que se esteiam as sociedades modernas. É ela, é só ela a causa real do nosso atraso material, moral e intelectual, visto como, sendo a base única da nossa constituição econômica, exerce a sua funesta influência sobre todos os outros ramos da atividade social que se derivam logicamente da cultura do solo.Mesmo no Rio de Janeiro, esta grande capital cosmopolita, feita de elementos heterogêneos, já hoje possuidora de importantes melhoramentos, o elemento servil é a pedra angular da riqueza. O estrangeiro que o visita, maravilhado pelos esplendores da nossa incomparável natureza, mal suspeita das amargas decepções que o esperam. Nos ricos palácios como nas vivendas burguesas, nos estabelecimentos de instrução como nos de caridades, nas ruas e praças públicas, nos jardins e parques, nos pitorescos e decantados arrabaldes, no cimo dos montes, onde tudo respira vida e liberdade, no íntimo do lar doméstico, por toda a parte, em suma, depara-selhe o sinistro aspecto do escravo, exalando um gemido de dor, que é ao mesmo tempo uma imprecação e um protesto. E junto do negro o azorrague, o tronco e a força, trípode lúgubre em que se baseia a prosperidade do meu país! Oh! não! Cada dia que continua este estado de coisas, é uma cusparada que se lança à face da civilização e da humanidade! Sei que me acoimarão de idealista, alegando que não se governam nações com sentimentalismos e retóricas. Pois bem, há um fato incontroverso e palpável, que vem corroborar as minhas utopias. E sabido que os imigrantes estrangeiros não procuram o Brasil ou não se conservam nele, por não quererem emparceirar-se com os escravos. A escravidão é uma barreira insuperável à torrente imigratória.(8) [DOUTOR Yes. Even though I do not present like a paladin, I modestly do what I can for the cause of emancipation. (Pause.) I am fully convinced that slavery is the greatest of social inequities, absolutely incompatible with the principles that undergird modern societies. Slavery is only the real cause of our material, moral and intellectual delay, seen as being the sole basis of our economic constitution, exerting its baleful influence over all other branches of social activity that logically derive from the culture of the soil. Even in Rio de Janeiro, this great cosmopolitan city, made of heterogeneous elements, already in possession of important improvements, the servile element is the cornerstone of our wealth. The foreigner who visits is amazed by the splendors of our unparalleled landscape, little suspects the bitter disappointments that await him. In rich palaces as in bourgeois homes, educational establishments and in charities, streets and public squares, in parks and gardens in the picturesque suburbs and decanted at the top of the mountains, where everything breathes life and liberty, in the depths of home, everywhere, in short, it faces the sinister presence of the slave, emitting a groan of pain, which is both a curse and a protest. And with the black man and the whip, the trunk and the power, the lugubrious tripod on which the prosperity of my country is based! Oh! No! Every day that this state of affairs continues, it spits in the face of civilization and humanity! I know they will accuse 38

me of being an idealist, saying that nations are not governed with sentimentality and rhetoric. Well, there's an incontrovertible and palpable fact that corroborates my utopia. It is well known that foreigners do not seek out Brazil nor do they stay here, for not wanting to deal with the slaves. Slavery is an insurmountable barrier to the flood of immigration.] What is curious in this very passionate speech are the reasons Doutor establishes for which Brazil should abolish slavery. As I stated earlier, Brazil worried incessantly about its image among the international community, and in this speech, such preoccupation appears to be the most salient. Here, Doutor explains that it is precisely the presence or hypervisibilty of the black body that repels Europeans from settling in Brazil. Slavery, thus, is posited as an institution that brings shame upon Brazil, not because it is in fact a degrading practice built on the subjugation of black bodies, but that it summons a “deprivitization”50 of this subjugation, rendering it inextricably discernible to outsiders. In this speech we see on the one hand a preoccupation with the abolition of slavery, and on the other hand the black body stands as a formidable barrier to Brazil’s Europeanization. The hope was to make Brazil, as Joaquim Nabuco stated, a place “where European immigration, attracted by the generosity of our institutions and the liberality of our regime, may constantly bring to the tropics a flow of lively, energetic, and healthy Caucasian blood, which we may absorb without danger” (Skidmore 23). Throughout, the slave is perpetually referenced as a problem or obstacle; slavery is bad precisely because of the presence and visibility of the slave in all areas of Brazilian life. The anxiety subsists in that period politicians and abolitionists worried about the potential conflation of Brazil’s national image with that of the black enslaved— ultimately placing it as antithetical to Europe. Therefore, it must be understood that slavery in Brazil was opposed not on 50

My use of the word “deprivitization” suggests that the presence of slavery renders visible its inherent subjugation and violation of black bodies.

39

humanitarian or moral grounds, but on nationalistic ideal, an ideal that did not include black bodies. Domestic Disorder Lourenço, a mulatto slave that has faithfully served the Salazar family for over twenty years serves as the center of the unfolding drama, and locus of domestic disorder. Lourenço as a transient figure lives under the perpetual threat of being evicted from the domestic space. Lourenço’s dislodgment is constantly thwarted, however, by the supplications of the family. Though said to be the family slave, Gabriela and Gustavo hold a particular affection for him. In the staging of this affection there exists a copious amount of ambiguity and at the play’s commencement the reader/ spectator does not entirely perceive the contours of such affection. To the children, he is like a member of the family curiously holding an almost paternalistic connection to him. This affection is most evident in the several scenes in which Salazar attempts to remove him from the domestic space and they all come to his aid. In the following scene, Salazar, in yet another futile attempt to remove Lourenço, comes face to face with him for the first time in the play: CAIXEIRO - Cá está o mulato. SALAZAR (A Lourenço.) - Prepara a tua trouxa; tens que seguir amanhã para cima. LOURENÇO (Fita-o e depois diz pausadamente.) - Mais nada? SALAZAR (Furioso.) - Mais nada! Desavergonhado! Patife! Cão! Puxa já daqui! LOURENÇO - Não lhe quis faltar ao respeito... Este é o meu modo de falar. SALAZAR - Modo de falar! Pois negro tem modo de falar? Quando estiveres em minha presença, abaixa a vista, ladrão! (Lourenço não lhe obedece.) Abaixa a vista, cachorro! Corto-te a chicote se o não fizeres! (Lourenço conserva-se imperturbável. Salazar avança com um chicote, mas Gustavo o contém.) GUSTAVO - Peço por ele, meu pai! Lourenço é um escravo dócil e obediente. (A Lourenço, com brandura.) Abaixa a vista, Lourenço. (Lourenço obedece.) Ajoelha-te! (Idem.) Pede humildemente perdão a meu pai de lhe não haveres obedecido incontinenti. LOURENÇO - Peço humildemente perdão a meu senhor... SALAZAR - Puxa daqui, burro! (Lourenço sai.) (8)

40

[CLERK - Here is the mulatto. SALAZAR - (to Lourenço.) - Prepare your backpack; tomorrow you will be leaving. LOURENÇO (Looks at him and says slowly.) – Anything else? SALAZAR (Furious.) – Anything else! Shameful! Scoundrel! Dog! Get the hell out of here! LOURENÇO – I did not intend to disrespect you... This is just the way I speak. SALAZAR - Way of speaking! Well, a nigger has a way of speaking! When you are in my presence, you lower your head, you hear, you thief! (Lourenço does not obey him) Lower your head, you dog! I’ll beat you with the whip if you don’t! (Lourenço remains calm). Salazar advances toward him with the whip, but Gustavo holds him back.) GUSTAVO – I beg you, father! Lourenço is an obedient and docile slave. (To Lourenço, with force.) Lower you head, Lourenço. (Lourenço obeys.) Get down on your knees! (Idem.) Humbly ask my father for forgiveness for not having obeyed him. LOURENÇO – Master, I humbly ask for forgiveness SALAZAR – Get out of here, you idiot! (Lourenço exits.)]

In this first encounter between Salazar and Lourenço the tension between them is evident. This scene proves pivotal, as through interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication we bear witness to the initial enunciation of slave resistance. Lourenco’s insistence upon looking Salazar in the eye purposefully challenges and ruptures the master –slave dialectic. Such is further evidenced in his response “este é o meu modo de falar” [this is my way of speaking]. Lourenço through the appropriation of language resignifies his subjectivity himself and affirms his personhood. Lourenço’s resistance, however, is multifarious, in that he not only employs speech, but silence in the face of injury. This scene dutifully constructs a union of silence and speech, positioning them as possible sites of slave resistance. Susan Sontag in The Aesthetics of Silence maintains that: “"Silence" never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue” (Sontag 30). 51By resiginifying his speech and silence, Lourenço insists on his dignity and reveals a lucid

51

Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

41

consciousness of the fragility of the institution of racialized slavery as embodied by Salazar and whip. Salazar, in his scurrilous attack on Lourenço is infuriated when his declaration does not incite fear or a reaction. Salazar’s effort to reestablish difference between them by virtue of force further affirms that “difference is that which threatens order and control; it is the polar opposite to our group. This mental representation of difference is but the projection of the tension between control and its loss… The tension produces an anxiety that is given in the shape of the Other. The Other is protean because of its source” (Gilman 21). Frantz Fanon has observed that the “Negro is a phobogenic object, a stimulus of anxiety” (121). In essence, anxiety is always a response to any alteration of the sense of order (real or imagined) between the self and the Other (real or imagined). In this scene both male and racial anxieties coalesce and function in tandem. Following the logic of Freud’s theory of hysteria, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin, posits the existence of what he calls “testeria,” smartly substituting the male testes for the female uterus as the metaphoric site of physic disturbance. Testeria, he argues, can be understood as the response of black males to the position in which they are called into being in white supremacist patriarchy in the United States, where the sole subject, the sole being who is synonymous with human and whose experience counts axiomatically as experience, is the white male (Saint-Aubin 2).52

52

Saint-Aubin Arthur Flannigan , “Testeria: The Dis-ease of Black Men in White Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture,” Callaloo (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 ) 1054-1073.

42

It is only when Gustavo enters and commands Lourenço to obey that he cedes; this ceding or disingenuous submission is only bequeathed on the grounds of filial kinship. In this regard, Gustavo is positioned as physical interstice between the two men—one, his “legitimate” and “biological” father, and the other who believes himself to be. By constructing a vexed paternity, Duarte and Azevedo intimate the tenuous and ambiguous nature of national identity under slavery.53 Soon after the encounter between Lourenço and Salazar, Salazar begins to reflect upon the family’s obsession with Lourenço. He asks himself: SALAZAR - Pois se eles sempre se colocam em sua frente para defendê-lo?! Ainda anteontem, minha mulher quase apanhou uma lambada que era destinada ao Lourenço! Protege-o escandalosamente, alegando ser ele cria da família, e não sei mais o quê... E há vinte e cinco anos, desde o meu casamento, que aturo as insolências daquele patife! Leva a ousadia ao ponto de não abaixar a vista quando fala comigo! Oh! mas desta vez, vendo-o definitivamente!(15) [SALAZAR – Why do they always go out of their way to defend him?! Even before the day before yesterday, my wife almost got a whipping that was intended for Lourenço! She protects him outrageously, alleging him to be the family slave, and I don’t know what else ... And for twenty-five years since my marriage, I’ve been putting up with the insolence of that rascal! He even has the audacity not to lower his head when he speaks to me! Oh! But his time is definitely coming!]

Subsequently, the truth is revealed to the reader/ spectator as Gabriela and Lourenço disclose the secret that haunted the household for over twenty years: LOURENÇO (Baixo e em tom de ameaça.) - Não quero absolutamente afastar-me de junto dele. GABRIELA (Muito nervosa.) - Sim, sim... Farei tudo quanto estiver ao meu alcance, mas não fales nesse tom, porque se nos ouvem...

53

As within cultures of patriarchy the “father” is both the course of authority and legitimacy. Paternity in this play becomes metonymical for a Brazilian national identity under slavery, caught between the material fact of its miscegenated origins and its concomitant attempt to veil and refashion them with a European ideal.

43

LOURENÇO - Não tenhas susto; há vinte e dois anos que guardo este segredo, e ainda não pronunciei uma palavra que pudesse despertar desconfianças. Prometo guardá-lo até à morte, se a senhora fizer que eu me conserve sempre ao lado dele. GABRIELA - Sim... prometo... prometo... (À parte.) Oh! Deus! mereço eu tamanho castigo? (Alto.) Sai daqui... Aproxima-se o senhor Salazar. (Lourenço sai.) (16) [LOURENÇO (Low and threatening tone.) – I do not want to leave his side GABRIELA (very nervous.) – Yes, yes ... I will do everything in my power, but don’t talk so loud, because if they hear us... LOURENÇO – Don’t be alarmed. For twenty two years I have guarded this secret, and I have not said a word that would raise suspicion. I promise to guard this secret until death, as long as you keep me here by his side. GABRIELA - Yes... I promise... I promise... (Alone.) Oh! God! What have I done to deserve such punishment? (Loudly) Get out of here... Salazar is coming. (Lourenço exits.)]

The disclosure of the secret that has haunted this household for twenty-two years is done with a relative amount of ambiguity. The authors outwardly obfuscate the details of this liaison and the reader/spectator is neither granted the back story, nor the conditions under which the liaison transpired. From the conversation between them, we can discern that this relationship was indeed consensual, as they do not reference the encounter as a source of violence or shame. Gabriela rather, is more troubled with veiling this secret from societal eyes. Here the authors draw a clear distinction between her legitimate societal position as wife and mother and senhora and her sexual and physical desire. Her desire is also a locus of tragedy, and is referred to as a punishment. In this dialectic of inward and outward desire, her body is situated between the physicality of her desire and the desire of the institution that her body must represent. For the authors, it is important to mention that the national construct of family is tenuous, protean and grossly superficial. They maintain that such constructs often disavow or veil individual desires. Comparatively, this illicit/ illegitimate encounter between them falls in line with the observations of historian Martha Hodes. She explains: “because marriage between black and whites was prohibited or severely discouraged by law in the nineteenth-century American

44

South, sexual liaisons between white women and black men took the legal form of fornication or adultery” (Hodes 19). Hodes' observations that the illegitimate means through which these liaisons between black men and white women transpired, affirms the thesis that such unions could only exist outside the realm of “legitimate domesticity”—(out)side the idea of nation .54Gilberto Freyre has also noted that there “were cases of irregularity between mistresses and their male slaves. There was one said occurrence in Pernambuco in the middle of the last century and in the bosom of an important family” (Freyre 213).55 Manoel Bomfim, in América Latina [Latin America], writes “not infrequently the young mistress, who has been brought up to rub against the sturdy slave lads (mulecotes), yields herself to them when her nerves give way to her irrepressible desires. Then it is that paternal morality intervenes; the Negro or mulatto is castrated with a dull knife, the wound is sprinkled with salt, and he is then buried alive. As for the lass, with an increased dowry, she is married off to a poor cousin…” (Bomfim 353).56 As Bomfim and Freyre explain, sex between white slave mistresses and their male slaves was not an uncommon occurrence. Such liaisons, indelibly a source of great shame for slaveholding families, and were reported as instantiations of sexual coercion, where the black male perpetrator was legally castrated. Lourenço by acting on his desire and divesting the white female body from the confines of racial Other, to putative sexual partner, subverts the ruses of the interracial taboo and positions it as a potential site of black resistance. Interracial sex, then, becomes the very conduit through

54

Brazilian miscegenation myth upon which the nation was politically fashioned is inherently one-sided and reverse interracial sex unsettled the very basis upon which interracial sex was used as a means of avowing white supremacy. 55 Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves .Casa-Grande & Senzala: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. 2d English language, rev ed. New York: Knopf, 1968; 1956. 56 Bomfim, Manoel José do. A América Latina : Males de Origem. Rio de Janeiro, RJ : TOPBOOKS.

45

which he asserts and avows his desire and personhood. The intentions behind this encounter are not initially disclosed, until Gustavo later, delineates it as an act of revenge. Though I would aver that the union between Gabriela and Lourenço could in fact be read as an act of affirmation and agency; I believe it essential, however, to further explore the contours of this act as it relates to black desire. Fanon says: “When the Negro makes contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego, the black man stops behaving as an actional person. The goal of his behavior will be the Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other alone can give him worth.”

72

In establishing a critical nexus between power, violence and the subject, Foucault argues: Obviously the establishing of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent; no doubt, the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time. But even though consent and violence are instruments or results, they do not constitute the principal or basic nature of power. The exercise of power can produce as much acceptance as may be wished for: it can pile up the dead shelter itself behind whatever threats it can imagine. In itself, the exercise of power is not a violence that sometimes hides, or an implicitly renewed consent. It operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself; it incites, it induces, it seduces it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more or subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. (Foucault 340)57 Taking Fanon and Foucault’s accounts at face value, I would suggest that this “worth” and “violent power” lay in the duplicity of recognition. Lourenço’s desire is intrinsically proscribed and filtered through his rapport with the raced power. Thus, Lourenço’s racialized subject position imbues signification not only to his body but the articulation of the act of interracial sex. As the encounter is indeed an act of desire, it must be understood that Lourenço 57

Michel Foucault 'The subject and power' in Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Vol three.

46

acts through and against the very violence of the structures that have systemically abnegated his desire. It is the conflation of sexual desire and revenge that serves as the conduit through which Lourenço articulates his political desire. As political desire is always a future desire, the very means through which the body seeks or articulates this desire is always responsive to and an articulation of its material condition.58 By resignifying or rearticulating the body politics through which racial supremacy is asserted, reverse miscegenation as revenge, attempts to undo this very construct as a poltical affirmation of the racialized body.

The Illegitimate Child Prior to the exposure of this climactic secret, there are several allusions that Gustavo is illplaced within the family. Josefa, perplexed by Gustavo, sees him an oddity or misfit amongst a grand patriarch, proper wife and genteel daughter:

JOSEFA- (...)Desde muito tempo que o tal nhonhô Gustavinho me dava que pensar! Ela é branca, o mano é muito disfarçado... Como é que saiu um filho moreno e de cabelos duros? Isto sempre me intrigou; mas, enfim, não dizia nada, porque eu só falo quando tenho rezão... Porém, despois que vi o tal Gustavinho variando por causa da moléstia, confirmaram-se as minhas desconfianças, e vou dar parte ao mano, aconteça o que acontecer. E sabe Deus, sabe Deus, se ela está doida, e se aquilo de estar no hospício não é manha! E de família! Já a mãe não se falava bem dela, e a irmã....cala-te, boca! Elas, pelo menos, procuravam gente branca. Mas não um escravo, um negro! Oh! fico toda arrepiada quando penso nisso! (À parte.) Com um escravo! parede. (A uma cadeira.) (20) [JOSEFA-(...) For some time now that little Gustavinho has made me to think! She is white, my brother is very masked ... How does he end up with a son with nappy brown hair? This always intrigued me, but ultimately I did not say anything because I only speak when I am right ... However, after that I saw that Gustavinho hallucinating, my suspicions were confirmed, and I will let brother know, come what may. Who knows, who knows, if she is crazy, and if her staying in the hospital is but a ploy! And of her family! Her mother was not spoken well of, and her sister… be quiet! They at least sought out white people. But not a slave, a nigger Oh! I get goosebumps when I think about it all! (Aside). With a slave! Wall. (To the chair.)]

58

The materiality of this position is always constituted in the present.

47

In the aformentioned passage Josefa takes notice of the physical contrast between Gustavo and the rest of the family and alludes to a history of infidelity in Carolina’s family. She observes that Gustavo’s skin is darker, his hair is coarser, lips thicker, and arrives at the conclusion that such could not possibly be the son of her brother. The importance of this somatic inventory lies in the fact that all of the attributes that allude to Gustavo’s illegitimacy are all implicitly black in nature. Josefa, as we will also see in chapter two, is the female matriarch that is charged with policing and maintaining “racial purity” and legitimacy within the domestic sphere. It is she who first suspects Gustavo’s “diluted” origins and subsequently reveals them. It is critical to note however, that Gustavo’s “difference” is not only alluded to on solely an anatomical basis, but Gustavos’s mixed blood is intimated employing period scientific theories of racial degeneracy and depicts blackness as intrinsically antithetical to whiteness. Accordingly, as within Gustavo’s blood abides the burden of his parents’ transgression, he submerges himself into a life of vice, gambling uncontrollably and ultimately finds himself in insurmountable debt. It is because Gustavo’s blood lines are so recently ‘co-mingled’ and not sufficiently diluted that his actions are direct consequence of his black ancestry.

In the climax of the play Josefa resolves to meet with Salazar to reveal the secret of Gustavos’s paternity. What we witness is not only revelation of this secret, but the past that Salazar himself has tried to conceal:

JOSEFA (Erguendo-se.) - Apare o carro! Quer que eu me explique? Pois eu me explico. (Pausa.) De que cor é a sua pele? SALAZAR - Aí vem o estilo cabalístico! (Com força.) Branca! JOSEFA - Sim... . apesar de que o nosso bisavô materno era pardo. SALAZAR (Tapando-lhe a boca.) - Psit, mulher!... JOSEFA - Bem pardo! SALAZAR - Mana! 48

JOSEFA - E foi escravo até a idade de cinco anos! SALAZAR - Cala-te, diabo! JOSEFA - Ninguém nos ouve. Era mulato e escravo; mas a aliança com galegos purificou a raça, de sorte que tanto você como eu somos perfeitamente brancos... Temos cabelos lisos e corridos, beiços finos e testa larga. SALAZAR - Bem; que mais? JOSEFA - Qual é a cor de sua mulher? SALAZAR - Branca... JOSEFA - E bem branca. Ora, sim, senhor. Como é que explica que seu filho seja bastante moreno, tenha beiços grossos e cabelos duros? Hein? SALAZAR (Sorrindo.) - Você é uma toleirona. Também a mim, isto causava espécie; mas disse-me um médico ser este fato observado em famílias que contam um ou mais ascendentes remotos de cor. Desgostou-me muito isso; mas enfim! São caprichos da natureza! Uma raça não se purifica inteiramente senão depois de séculos... A mestiçagem com africanos produz atavismos... JOSEFA - Bem... não digo mais nada... Prefiro deixá-lo na doce ilusão. (Vai a sair.) SALAZAR (Segurando-a.) - Com mil diabos! Já agora quero saber! JOSEFA - Quer? SALAZAR - Sim! JOSEFA - Pois ouça lá, mesmo porque já estou engasgada. Sou capaz de estourar, se fico calada! Ontem à noite fui ao quarto de Gustavo... Ele estava ardendo em febre e delirava... Sabe o que dizia? Dizia assim - Eu? Filho de um negro? Eu? Negro? Eu? Ladrão?! SALAZAR (Muito agitado.) - E o que conclui você daí? JOSEFA (Hipocritamente.) - Concluo... concluo que o Lourenço é uma cria de família... muito estimado... escandalosamente protegido por sua mulher. Deus lhe perdoe, e.. (Salazar agarra na garganta da velha, dá um grito e sai correndo.) (24) [JOSEFA (Getting up) – Hold your horses! You want me to explain? Well, I'll explain (Pause.) What color is your skin? SALAZAR – Here comes that cabalistic style of yours! (With force.) White! JOSEFA - Yes … despite the fact that our maternal great-grandfather was a mulatto. SALAZAR (Covering his mouth.) - PSIT woman! ... JOSEFA – Good’n black SALAZAR - Sis! JOSEFA – And was a slave until the age of five years! SALAZAR – Shut the hell up! JOSEFA – No one can hear us. And was a mulatto slave, but the alliance with the Galician race purified our blood, so that you and I are perfectly white…We have straight flowing hair, thin lips and high foreheads. SALAZAR - Well, what else? JOSEFA - What color is your wife? SALAZAR - White... JOSEFA – And very white. Why, yes, sir. How do you explain that your child is very dark, has thick lips and nappy hair? Huh? SALAZAR You’re crazy. Also to me, this has raised suspicion, but a doctor told me that this was seen in families that include one or more remote ancestors of color. It disgusts 49

me, but hey! That’s the law of Nature! One race does not cleanse itself completely. It takes centuries for a race to completely purify itself JOSEFA—Well... I won’t say anything else ... I prefer to leave you in your sweet little illusion. (Goes out) SALAZAR (Grabbing her) - Damn! Now I want to know! JOSEFA – Do you really? SALAZAR – Yes! JOSEFA – Well, listen here. Since I’m already suffocating, I am capable of bursting at the seams if I stay quiet! Last night I went to Gustavo’s room. He was burning with fever and was delirious… You know what he said? He said..I? The son of a nigger? Me? A nigger! A thief! SALAZAR (Very agitated.) – And so what do you conclude? JOSEFA (Hypocritically) - I conclude ... I conclude that Lourenço, highly esteemed family slave... outrageously protected by your wife. God forgive him, and... (Salazar grabs Josefa’s throat, gives a cry and runs off.)]

In this provocative and revelatory scene the authors juxtapose the two colliding back stories of Salazar’s black ancestry and the disavowal of his paternity. This duplicity is not gratuitous, for it is in the domestic space that these colliding histories serve as the embodiment of the national narrative. This duplicitous revelation affirms that the conflation of blackness with bondage and whiteness with mastery and freedom cannot be coherently reconciled in the Brazilian narrative. Writers such as Machado de Assis, equally in O Caso da Vara and Pai contra Mãe have explored the notion of double consciousness and racial subjectivity, employing the notion of consciousness of self, history and material condition in relation and in disjuncture to the other, in the articulation of human actions.59

In this sense Duarte and Azevedo imbue miscegenation, as national legacy, with a phantasmagorical presence that seemingly haunts the domestic sphere. In many ways the authors maintain that the notion of racial purity in the Brazilian case is not only hypocritical, but a blatant refutation of Brazil’s history. What is curious about the configuration of Salazar’s origins

59

For more information see Machado de Assis afro-descendente escritos de caramujo by Eduardo de Assis Duarte, 2007.

50

is that the authors employ the same trope of interracial sex between his pardo great-grandfather and Galician great grandmother. This union according to Josefa “purified the race” and rendered the two “disfarçados” or masked, thus suggesting that the idea of whiteness is not only a social construct, but intrinsically performative.

For it is no secret that biology alone does not determine racial identity. Our concept of race is equally shaped by social norms and expectations, which are based on historical events and current practices. The inherent contradiction or duplicitous nature of this revelation demands us to reflect on whiteness not as a biological fact, but as a social, political and ideological construct 60

contingent upon institutional performances of racial power. In this sense, the authors show that “whiteness” as a Brazilian social ideal and material desire is a process in which the dilution of blood line summons a dilution and ultimate disavowal or erasure of historical body.

What is interesting to observe is that this dilution or erasure is one that is intrinsically physical. The paradox of this desire to “dilute” would be achieved through the very means through which the nation was created.

Gustavo after having learnt the identity of his true father suffers a fever and a severe case of delirium. It is in this altered state of consciousness that he confronts Salazar and articulates what I would delineate as a black consciousness. In espousing his racial identity he confronts Salazar and constructs a narrative-portrait of the enslaved black body:

SALAZAR - Filho do meu escravo! GUSTAVO - Já o sabia?! Tanto agora como mais tarde! SALAZAR - Esta sala não é lugar de moleques. Saia! 60

For a detailed analysis and whiteness and identity politics, see George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whitenes: How White People Profit from Identity politics, 2006.

51

GUSTAVO (Erguendo-se a custo.) - Sairei... Antes, porém, há de ouvir-me... SALAZAR - Não discuto com os filhos dos meus escravos! GUSTAVO (Com calma terrível.) - Sou filho do seu escravo, sim, e nem por isso me julgo mais desprezível do que quando supunha ser seu filho, percebe? A febre escalda-me.., o delírio faz-me ver a nu a verdade das coisas... Ouça-me... (Segurando-o.) Desde o momento em que soube que me corria nas veias o sangue de um escravo, senti que este sangue vinha, não deturpar ou desonrar, mas sim tonificar o meu organismo, corrompido pela educação que o senhor me deu! Agora, ao menos, tenho no coração um sentimento, coisa que só de nome conhecia... Dinheiro! estolidez! vícios! crueldade! insolência! bestialidade! eis tudo quanto eu sabia do mundo. E foi o senhor que me ensinou! Percebe? SALAZAR - Já disse que não discuto com um negro!... GUSTAVO - Negro, sim! Sou da raça escravizada! Sinto as faces abrazadas pelo sangue ardente dos filhos do deserto, que os seus predecessores algemam à traição, para virem com eles poluir o seio virgem das florestas americanas! Negro, sim! Sou negro! Estou aqui em sua frente como uma solene represália de milhares de desgraçados cujas lágrimas o têm locupletado. Ah! os senhores pisam a tacões a raça maldita, cospem-lhe na face?! Ela vinga-se como pode, introduzindo a desonra no seio de suas famílias! (Cai extenuado e em prantos.) Ó minha mãe! (22) [SALAZAR - Son of my slave! GUSTAVO – So, you already knew?! Better now than later! SALAZAR - The living room is no place for moleques. Get out! GUSTAVO (Moves to stand.) - I will go ... But first, you’ll hear me out... SALAZAR – I do not talk to the children of my slaves! GUSTAVO (With terrible calm.) Yes, I am the son of your slave and nor because of it do I consider myself more despicable than when I was supposed to be your son. You understand? This burning fever, this delirium has made me see the truth…understand me? (Grabbing him) From the moment I learned that the slave blood was coursing through my veins I felt that this blood was not meant to defile or dishonor, but to purify my body, corrupted by the education you gave me! Now, at least in my heart there is emotion, something I only knew the name of… Money! Obtuseness! Vices! Cruelty! Insolence! Bestiality! That’s all I knew about the world. And you were the man who taught me! Understand? SALAZAR - I said I do not argue with niggers… GUSTAVO – Black, yes! I am of the enslaved race! I feel my face incensed by the fiery blood of the children of the desert, whom your predecessors shackle through betrayal, to come with them to pollute the virgin bosom of America’s forests! Black, yes! I am black! I am here in front of you like a solemn reprisal for the thousands of vanquished whose tears have indulged you. Ah, the masters trample the damned race, spit on its face?! It will vindicate itself the way it can, by bringing dishonor to the heart of your families! (He falls overwrought and in tears.) Oh mother of mine!] In this scene, the reader/ spectator bears witness to the evolution of Gustavo’s consciousness from an immature child who disingenuously reproduces Salazar’s rhetorical-racial 52

posture, to a lucid critique of slavery and racial discrimination. He accuses Salazar of making him devoid of feeling and obsessed by financial gain at the price of subjugation of black bodies. By affirming “sou filho do seu escravo” [I am the son of your slave], he asserts Lourenço as ‘legitimate’ father and positions himself as the very embodiment of Lourenço’s revenge. In this divestment of paternal right he alludes not only to Salazar’s impotence in the physiological sense, but the very impotence of the institution that Salazar embodies. Gustavo additionally constructs a portrait of the black enslaved subject and decisively affiliates himself as a means of disidentifying with Salazar and the institution of slavery. In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, consciousness, the ontological fundament of human being, arises from a kind of Hegelian negation. Consciousness is the annihilation, the withdrawal, of itself from the world around it. Thus, consciousness depends on “nothingness”; that is, it annihilates what is in order to be—it transcends the world and itself in order to know them. This nothingess for Sartre is the basis of Sartrean human freedom “Freedom is the human being…secreting his own nothingness” (Sartre 80).61 Sartre declares “in freedom the human being is his own past (as also his own future) in the form of nihilation…[T]here ought to exist for the human being…a certain mode of standing opposite his past and his future, as being both this past and this future and as not being them” This mode is anguish: “it is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom, or if you prefer anguish is the mode of being of freedom as `

consciousness of being.” (Sartre 80). What seems principally salient here is that for Sartre this anguished state is the freedom that human beings possess and it is precisely in the anguish of Gustavo’s newly racialized body that desarticulates his body from the institution of slavery.

61

Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1966, c1956.

53

Sartre further affirms that “it is through my horror that I am carried toward the future and horror nihilates itself in that it constitutes the future as possible. Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being” (Sartre 82).

In Gustavo constructing both a rhetorical and affective connection with not only Lourenço but the enslaved body, he positions himself within a space of a collective consciousness and resistance. He intently employs his former racial privilege to approach Salazar denouncing the slave regime and giving visibility and narrative to the enslaved black body. In this narrative-portrait Gustavo positions himself as “the voice” or conduit through which black suffering and desire articulated. It is through him that we learn that the liaison between Gabriela and Lourenço was indeed an act of revenge intended to bring disgrace and dishonor upon the domestic sphere. Gustavo’s declaration posits sex not only as a potential affirmation of the subject, but a place of “settling scores.” Although Lourenço does not profess this revelation himself, Gustavo legitimizes the transgressions of his mother and father and dutifully positions the encounter as an act of resistance. Therefore, Gustavo in the wake of abolition serves as a metaphor for a bourgeoning black consciousness. This consciousness, however, as the play unfolds is short lived, and inevitably silenced by death. O Escravocrata’s construction of secrets, revelations and confrontations comes to a close with the suicide of Lourenço. No longer under the protection of Gabriela or Gustavo, Lourenço decides to take his life rather than to fall prey to Salazar’s sadistic whims. In the following, we witness the continuing trope of black consciousness and slave resistance as Lourenço’s death incites a potentially successful slave revolt: SERAFIM - Patrão.., patrão... O Lourenço enforcou-se! 54

GUSTAVO (Com um grito.) - Enforcou-se! (Sai como um louco, mal podendo suster. Salazar tem um sorriso de satisfação.) SERAFIM - Os negros, ao verem-no morto, revoltam-se, e, armados de foices, perseguem o feitor pelo cafezal a dentro! Acuda-o! SALAZAR - Miseráveis! (Agarra uma espingarda que está a um canto e sai arrebatadamente)... SALAZAR - Venham! Morrerei no meu posto e venderei caro a vida! CAROLINA (Entrando.) - Não se exponha! Fuja por ali, meu pai! SALAZAR (Louco de furor.) - Seu pai? Eu! Procure-o no meio desses que vêm me assassinar. Talvez o encontre! (Arrombam a porta. Entra uma multidão de escravos armados de foices e machados. Avançam para Salazar. Carolina, interpondo-se, ajoelha.) CAROLINA (Com lágrimas na voz.) - É meu pai! Piedade! (Os negros ficam interditos, olham uns para os outros, abatem as armas e retiram-se resmungando, Salazar abraça Carolina e chora.) SALAZAR - São as minhas primeiras lágrimas, Carolina! (Longa pausa, durante a qual Salazar soluça apoiado ao colo da filha.) Mas... Gustavo? DOUTOR (Entrando.) - Fui encontrá-lo morto, junto ao cadáver de seu pai. (30-31) [SERAFIM - Master.., Master... Lourenço has hung himself! GUSTAVO (With a scream.) He hung himself! (Runs out like a mad man , unable to control himself. Salazar has a smile of satisfacton.) SERAFIM – The slaves, upon seeing him dead, revolted and are armed with sickles and are chasing after the overseer inside. Help him! SALAZAR – Damn slaves! (Grabs a pistol that is resting in a corner and exits suddenly)... SALAZAR – Come on! I will die at my post and I am not going down without a fight! CAROLINA (Entering.) –Don’t go out there! Escape, father! SALAZAR (Mad with fury.) – Your father? I! Look for him in the midst of those who’ve come to kill me. Maybe you’ll find him! (Breaking down the door. Enters a crowd of slaves armed with scythes and axes. Next to Salazar is Carolina, kneeling) CAROLINA (With tears in her voice.) He’s my father! Have mercy! (The slaves come to halt, look at one another, put down their weapons and retire complaining, Salazar embraces Carolina and cries) SALAZAR – These are the first tears I’ve ever cried, Carolina! (A long pause, during which Salazar weeps on his daughter’s shoulder.) But…Gustavo? DOUTOR (Entering.) – I just found him dead, next to his father’s corpse.] The news of Lourenço’s suicide is brought to the reader/spectator by word of mouth. Though we do not have access to the concrete image of Lourenço’s death, we are told that it has provoked profound disquiet amongst the slaves. This revolt is soon suffocated by the slaves themselves upon hearing Carolina’s supplications beseeching them to spare her father’s life. 55

What is important to underscore is that this fleeting image creates a communion between Lourenço’s physical death and the ephemeral mobilization of slave resistance. Curiously, this is the only scene in the play in which Lourenço is presented as being a part of a collective slave body. The sight/ site of Lourenço’s hanging duplicitously and paradoxically serves as both a source of consciousness and concomitant erasure of the black body. However, for the enslaved, it is through bearing witness or serving as a collective witness to Lourenço’s disjunctured body that they are called to reckon with the enslaved position of their own bodies.62 I am intrigued however by the rather contradictory nature of this scene. While the reader/ spectator could rightfully interpret Lourenço’s suicide as a plausible act of resistance in which the captive flesh breaks its fetters and consciously determines its own destiny, I shall resist entirely ascribing this death as resistant. Rather, I believe, much like text itself it is ambivalent and paradoxical. Gustavo, as he comes into an articulated resistance, it too along with his body is silenced next to Lourenço’s hanging body. The tragic double death of father and son renders a tragic view of the self determination of the enslaved, and prevails as an inescapable legacy in which black bodies divested of agency willingly seek their freedom in the arms of death. Ultimately, like the abolitionist movement wracked with contradictions, these deaths lay inextricably between resistance and defeat. In regarding Gabriela’s body, Freud’s theory of hysteria is particularly useful for our consideration. Freud observed that women’s suffering arose from the repression of memory experienced as so horrible that the patients were unable to communicate it in language. In essence, the repressed memory continued to reside, and the unconscious, bereft of spoken

62

See Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America, 1997.

56

language, in excess of language, spoke this memory through the hysterical symptoms of the body. 63 Therefore it is important to consider that while Azevedo and Duarte attempt to imbue the slave with some degree of resistance, the text also equally succeeds in its erasure. While in life and death Lourenço utilizes his body to escape and challenge and undermine the institution of slavery, his death seems to negate his depiction as an agential subject and renders him a victim of that very agency. As the conflation of blackness, victimhood and resistance, Lourenço’s death stands as a question to the symbolic and material boundaries of black agency under the slave regime. In the end, black resistance under the slave regime is still-born, or an act against itself; it is both agent provocateur of and obstruction to its own enunciation. Ultimately, all menaces by death of mind and body are expunged in the restoration of national domesticity.

63

For a thorough account of silence, erasure and black subjectivity, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

57

Chapter Two Desire Disavowed: Critical Re-membrance, Belonging and the Abject Pornography of Torture in Aluísio Azevedo’s O Mulato You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter. You’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter ever since the days of slavery. — James Baldwin in debate James Kilpatrick November 26, 1960. One word alone floated to the surface of his thoughts: “mulatto.” And it grew and grew, exapanding, transforming itself into a terrible cloud that cloaked his entire past. A parasitic idea, it was strangling all his other thoughts. “Mulatto!” — Aluísio Azevedo, Mulatto. I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine. — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Day Break.

Aluísio Azevedo’s O Mulato [The Mulatto], published in 1881, just seven years prior to the abolition of slavery marks the inauguration of the Brazilian Naturalist movement. Though it marked the debut of this critical literary movement, the novel, much like his brother’s play O Escravocrata, was received violently by the public, ultimately forcing the author to escape his native province of Maranhão and take refuge in the court of Rio de Janeiro. The same outraged public, ironically, had received his previous romantic novel Uma Lágrima de Mulher [A Woman’s Tear] (1879) with great acclaim.64 Azevedo, an ardent abolitionist65 constructs in O Mulato a piercing social tableau— exposing a decadent, hellacious, racist society that lives and thrives off of slave labor. Considered by several critics to be an anticlerical and antiracist novel66, it recounts the tale of Raimundo, the fruit of an affair between a Portuguese slave holder, José and his loyal slave, 64

Marotti, Giorgio. Black Characters in the Brazilian Novel. 6 Vol. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1987. 65 For a detailed account of Azevedo’s literary and poltical life see Jean-Yves Mérian’s Aluísio Azevedo, vida e obra (1857-1913) : o verdadeiro Brasil do século XIX, 1988 and Raimundo de Menezes’ Aluísio Azevedo : uma vida de romance, 1958. 66 See João Mendoça Cardeiros’s O Mulato, 1881-1981 : Cem Anos de um romance Revolucionário.

58

Domingas. After the brutal torture of his mother at the hands of Dona Quitéria, José’s legitimate wife, Raimundo is freed at the age of five and shipped to Portugal, summoning the onset of a vicious cycle of physical and psychic displacement. While in Portugal, Raimundo’s past becomes a mystery to him and the plot of the story is therein constructed around his incessant search and desire to reconstruct his past. Central to this reconstruction or re-membrance67 is learning the identity of his mother—a fact secreted from him since his departure. Raimundo returns to his native Maranhão after having completed law school to receive his inheritance and to eventually install himself in the court of Rio de Janeiro. The people of São Luís, well aware of his tainted origins, receive him, to his perplexity, rather inhospitably and with relative distance. In the house of his uncle he reencounters his cousin, the romantic Ana Rosa, with whom he falls in love and later wishes to marry. It is upon requesting her hand in marriage that the secret of his racial identity is revealed and the life he once knew is forever changed. O Mulato magisterially exemplifies Azevedo’s antislavery and abolitionist posture par excellence and constructs not only a bitter indictment of his native province, but also, his profound pessimism and disquiet regarding the present and future of the black body within the national context. O Mulato, is a story of re-membrance, that has at its core one man’s arduous attempt to piece together, articulate and renegotiate his body, in relation to historical memory. By constructing a critical nexus between history, institution and the body, Azevedo shows how historical narratives attached to bodies collide, haunt and configure their place within the national politics. 67

Here I am employing author Toni Morrison’s concept of the nexus between body and memory. Morrison purports that the understanding of black bodies within the production of national history lies in a critical examination of the two.

59

In this chapter I focus attention more precisely on the mulatto body’s connection to gendered abject pornographic performances of torture. I am particularly interested in how this relationship articulates and disarticulates the mulatto body’s claims for political agency and affiliation. In analyzing the mulatto body, I explore what Lauren Berlant calls “a national subject, the paradigm problem citizen.” The mulatto, she affirms is “paradoxically suspended between citizen and alien inhabitant, mulatto figures more than pointed to racial categories, they embodied the civil structure that depended on these categories while also challenging the legitimacy of that system”(Berlant 6). 68 Rather than compare, the intent of this chapter is to place Brazilian and North American slaveries in conversation to reveal their insidious commonalities and differences, and show that the abject torture of black bodies was not merely a fate suffered by Brazilian slaves, but a providence, a brutal economy and legacy of violence that betided the enslaved throughout the Atlantic. By examining slave emancipation and miscegenation anxieties within a conversant framework, I believe that we might remove slavery from its understanding in the singular and universal, and to better regard it as rendering multiple, divergent, and oft intersecting consequences that produced manifold articulations of black subjectivity. In this analysis, I turn to the torture of the black female body to argue that her physical abjection frames and establishes the black male body’s disavowal within the context of national affiliation. Employing Freudian and Lacanian theorizations of disavowal and the perverse, I will situate the heart of this analysis at the site of the torture of Raimundo’s mother, Domingas. I posit the torture of Domingas as a critical moment in the formation of Raimundo’s subjectivity.

68

Berlant, Lauren. National Brands/ National Body: Imitation of Life. In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and the Modern Text, ed. Hortense J.Spillers. New York: Routeledge, 1991.

60

To frame Domingas’ body I employ Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to explore what Kristeva’s interlocutor Darieck Scott has posited as “a way of describing an experience, an inherited (physically introjected) historical legacy, and a social condition defined and underlined by defeat” (Scott 12).69 Domingas’ disavowal, her abjected body and memory are critically tied to Raimundo’s narrative destiny, since the black and miscegenated male bodies are necessarily articulated by virtue of the specter of the black female body’s sexual domination within the national narrative. In other words, within the framework of national miscegenation myth, the fate of the mulatto body is always determined by the physical domination of the black female body by white men. In her critical meditation on the spectacular quality of torture for black bodies, critic Hortense J. Spillers adumbrates: These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually "transfers" from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments? As Elaine Scarry describes the mechanisms of torture, these lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, and punctures of the flesh create, the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and culture , whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, “owners,” “soul drivers,” “overseers,” and “men of God,” apparently colludes with the protocol of “ search and destroy.” This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside. (Spillers 207)70 Utilizing Spillers mediations on branding, I am considering how the potential devolution of this branding, the continuation, or legacy of a material and metaphorical torture bespoken by race, summons the foreclosure of black agency and desire. As such, I employ the trope of

69

Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination .New York: New York University Press, 2010. 70 Spillers, Hortense. Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.

61

pornography not only to further elucidate the sexual underpinnings of these scenes of subjection, but the perversion and pleasure therein derived. I demonstrate how this pleasure and perversion are constitutive in the disavowal of the black male body’s political articulation within the context of the nation. I concern myself with the nexus between perverse pleasure and privilege and illustrate how this curious binary bequeathed by the institution of slavery, foregrounds abject subjectivity as analogous to black disavowal. Freud first introduces the concept of disavowal to indicate ‘a specific mode of defense which consists in the subject’s refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 118).71 He introduces the term in connection with the castration complex, the traumatic perception being the sight of the female genitalia; when children first discover the absence of the penis in the girl, they ‘disavow the fact and believe that they do see a penis all the same’ (Freud 143–4).72 Freud continues to employ the term throughout the rest of his work, linking it specifically both to psychosis and to fetishism. In these clinical conditions, disavowal is always accompanied by the opposite attitude (acceptance of reality), since it is ‘rarely or perhaps never’ possible for ‘the ego’s detachment from reality to be carried through completely’ (Freud 201). 73 The coexistence in the ego of these two contradictory attitudes to reality leads to what Freud terms ‘the splitting of the ego.’

Lacan, however, works the construct into a meticulous theory, connecting and contrasting it particularly with the operations of repression and foreclosure. Whereas Freud had only linked disavowal to one form of perversion, Lacan makes it the chief operation in all forms of perversion. And whereas Freud had also linked disavowal with psychosis, Lacan limits 71

Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.B. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris : Quadrige/PUF, 1967. Freud, Sigmund: SE XIX, 1923. 73 Freud, 1940a:SE XXIII. 72

62

disavowal exclusively to the structure of perversion (Lacan 221).74 Disavowal is the fundamental operation in perversion, just as repression and foreclosure are the fundamental operations in neurosis and psychosis.

Like Freud, Lacan asserts that disavowal is always accompanied by a concurrent acknowledgement of what is disavowed (Lacan 194).75 Whereas the term disavowal originally denotes, in Freud’s work, only one side of this operation (the side of denial), for Lacan the term comes to denote both sides, the simultaneous denial and recognition of castration. While Freud relates disavowal to the perception of the absence of the penis in women, Lacan connects it to the realization of the absence of the phallus in the Other (Lacan 197-8).76The traumatic perception is, in Lacan’s account, the realization that the cause of desire is always a lack. It is this realization that disavowal manifests; disavowal is the failure to accept that lack causes desire, the belief that desire is caused by a presence (Lacan 215).77

Here, I am linking the concept of disavowal that bodily torture begets and symbolizes as a political act in the foregrounding of black subjectivity. I maintain that under the institution of slavery, disavowal in both the physical and political sense are mutually constitutive—established by virtue of the performance and propagation of the perverse. This relationship, thus, frames citizenship and abrogates the right to participate in the imagining and conception of the nation that it might presume, isolating it inextricably within the economy of pleasure. I will suggest throughout this chapter that this unprotection or unprotectedness of the flesh and body catalyzed

74

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 75 Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 19566-57. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. 76 Ibid. 77 Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 1956 6-57.

63

by connubiality of desire and institution inscribes subjectivity and purposefully locates the black body within the confines of the pornographic. In this sense, it must be considered that in the universe of slavery, the notions of pleasure, perversion and belonging are fundamentally interconnected; and both the notion of belonging and pleasure are conduits through which desire is made manifest. I am considering belonging that is “to be attached or bound by birth, allegiance,”78 and more precisely the performance of belonging in the universe of slavery as phallocentristic— an edifice constructed and fashioned upon white male desire. By employing the pornographic, we may ascertain the torture of black flesh as a medium through which to examine the possibility or impossibility of this political construct for the black body within the imperatives of nation building. I will further suggest that central to erasure and disavowal of belonging is the critical obfuscation and erasure of memory and body. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, subject is defined as “one who is under the rule of another or others, especially one who owes allegiance to a government or ruler; being under dominion, rule, or authority, as of a sovereign, state, or some governing power.”79 On the contrary, citizen is defined as: “one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman.” 80In my analysis of this novel, I have chosen to focus on the question of belonging rather than citizenship. I use the idiom of belonging to explore the black male body’s affective, physical, political relationship to the nation. Brazilian scholar and critic Luiz Fernando Valente has cogently argued that the concept of citizenship, as it is espoused and practiced in the contemporary was not in 78

"Belonging." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 11 Feb. 2011. 79 "Subject." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 11 Feb. 2011. . 80 "Citizen." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 13 Feb. 2011. .

64

practice in 19th century Brazil (Valente 11-29).81 While citizenship establishes a nexus between rights, privileges and freedom, it does not however capture the affective or the emotive rapport of the dispossessed subject to the nation.82Belonging, I believe, to be attached or bound by birth or allegiance establishes the emotional interplay that is too oft ignored in analyses of slave bodies. As we will see throughout this chapter, it is the emotional rapport and consequent disaffiliation that summons political disavowal. This distinction foregrounds the perversion of the site of torture as national space: a center and periphery—at which the place or non-place of the black body is inscribed with individual and collective meaning and avowed as locus of perversion.

Perversion was originally defined by Freud as any form of sexual behavior, which deviates from the norm of heterosexual genital intercourse.83 However, this definition is problematized by Freud’s own notions of the polymorphous perversity of all human sexuality, which is characterized by the absence of any pregiven natural order. Lacan subverts this distinction in Freudian theory by considering perversion not as a form of behavior but as a clinical structure (Lacan 221).84Lacan, conversely, defines perversion as not simply an aberration in relation to social criteria, or an incongruity contrary to proper morals (Lacan 220).85 The distinction between perverse acts and the perverse structure implies that, while there are certain sexual acts which are closely associated with perverse structures, a perverse structure remains perverse even when the acts associated with it are socially approved. 81

Valente, Luiz Fernando. “Brazilian Literature and Citizenship: From Euclides da Cunha to Marcos Dias.” in Luso- Brazilian Review, 38 (2): (2001) 11-28. 82 I am greatly indebted to Professor Luiz Fernando Valente for this critical distinction. 83 Freud, 1905d. 84 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. 85 Ibid.

65

There are two main ways in which Lacan characterizes the perverse structure: The Phallus and Disavowal, and the Drive; however, for the purposes of this discussion I shall focus on the latter. The drive in Lacan’s structure of the perverse adumbrates that the subject situates himself in a particular way in relation to the drive. In perversion, the subject locates himself as object of the drive, as the means of the other’s jouissance (Lacan 185).

86

I am arguing that this “other” is in fact the institution of slavery and that the performative perversion of the torturing of black bodies on an individual level is interlocutionary for collective performances of raced power and communal pleasure. To this end, my contention maintains that these scenes of racial subjection inform us that all subjects (in the political sense), are compulsorily pornographic in the eyes of the State. This pornographic subjectivity, positions the body as conduit through which one may or may not make political claims—fettered in and to the production of a pleasure, a perversion, alien to the self. This despotism and sovereignty embodied in the abjection of race lies in the ability and right to regard, to depict, to inscribe, and to name.

Framing Slavery Utilizing space and milieu, Azevedo constructs a social tableau. Through social events that take place within the domestic space, Azevedo renders evidence of the centrality of slavery in Maranhense society. Prior to revealing Raimundo’s back story, Azevedo first discloses the rhetoric of master –slave relations by placing the public and private in perpetual dialectic. In

86

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977.

66

regarding this rhetorical strategy, we must examine how the narrative of the black body is constructed in dialogue: Dantes os escravos tinham que fazer! Mal serviam a janta iam aprontar e acender os candeeiros deitar-lhes novo azeite e colocá-los no seu lugar... E hoje? É só chegar o palitinho de fogo à bruxaria do bico de gás e... caia-se na pândega! Já não há tarefa! Já não há cativeiro! É por isso que eles andam tão descarados! Chicote! chicote, até dizer basta! que é do que eles precisam. Tivesse eu muitos, que lhes juro, pela bênção de minha madrinha, que lhes havia de tirar sangue do lombo!(60)87 [In the olden day slaves has plenty to do! As soon as supper was served, off they went to prepare to light the lanterns, fill them with fresh oil, and hang them up. And today? All they have to do is touch the burning wood match to the black magic of the gas outlet, and then they’re having fun! There’s no drudgery for them anymore! You can’t even call it slavery! That’s why they go about so impudently! The whip! The whip, until they say ‘enough!’ That’s what they need! If I had many slaves, I swear to you, by my godmother’s blessing, I’d bloody their backs!] (85) 88

Through the establishment of interpenetrative space, Azevedo’s deployment of dialogue during these social gatherings establishes a form of social and collective memory. In these descriptions Azevedo pays particular attention to the slave body and its relation to space. Slave bodies are purposefully reproduced and evoked in discourse, whilst their own voices are never heard. The slave bodies within these oral narratives/ testimonies appear in the capacity of servitude, object of torture, but above all, as witnessed in O Escravocrata, as both a domestic and national problem. This narrative strategy of depicting the black body is equally employed in

87

Azevedo, Alusio. O Mulato. São Paulo: Ática, 1977. Azevedo, Alusio. Mulato;translated by Murray Graeme MacNicoll. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. All English translations of O Mulato are from this text unless otherwise acknowledged. 88

67

the novels and contos of Machado de Assis, in which the absence and appearance of the black body as servant or abject is analogous or a mirror of societal station. 89 In these narratives, Aluísio Azevedo demonstrates how slavery renders the enslaved an invariable topic of conversation, emphasizing the slave body’s configuration and scripting not only vis-à-vis white supremacy, but the institution of slavery that sustains it. To this end, Azevedo constructs a communal/national discourse denoted by a sadistic obsession entrenched in the subjugation and physical torture of black bodies. Further along in the narrative, at the same social gathering, Freitas, noting Raimundo’s ennui, takes advantage of the occasion to relate to him what he perceives to be the evil of the black body in the domestic sphere: Freitas passou-se à janela de Raimundo, e aproveitou a oportunidade para despejar contra este uma estopada a respeito do mau serviço doméstico feito pelos escravos. Reconheço que nos são necessários, reconheço!... mas não podem ser mais imorais do que são!... As negras, principalmente as negras!... São umas muruxabas, que um pai de família tem em casa, e que domem debaixo da rede das filhas e que lhes contam histórias indecentes!Foi uma imoralidade! Ainda outro dia, em certa casa, uma menina, coitada apareceu coberta de piolhos indecorosos, que pegara da negra! Sei de outro caso de uma escrava que contagiou a uma família inteira de impigens e dartros de caráter feio! E note doutor que isto e o menos, o pior é que elas contam às suas sinhazinhas tudo o que praticam aí por essas ruas! Ficam as pobres moças sujas de corpo e alma na companhia de semelhante corja! Afiançolhe meu caro senhor doutor, que, se conservo pretos ao meu serviço, é porque não tenho outro remédio! Contudo...(80) [Freitas came over to Raimundo’s window and took advantage to spill out for his benefit a boring speech concerning the poor domestic services performed by slaves. “I recognize that we must have them. I’ll admit it! But they’re just about the most immoral things in existence. The Negresses, yes, above all the Negressess! They’re a bunch of whores each family man has right in his home, sleeping under his daughters’ hammocks and telling them dirty stories. Such immorality! Just the other day, in a certain home a little girl, poor thing, turned up infested with revolting fleas she had picked up from the Negress. And I know another of another case of a slave woman who infected an entire family with ugly rashes and eczema! And note, sir, that this is the least of it. What’s worse is they tell their 89

Such instances appear in Machado de Assis’ much noted novels Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro and short story O Caso da Vara.

68

white missies everything they do out on the streets. Our poor daughters end up with dirty bodies and souls in the company of such rabble! I guarantee, my dear sir, that if I do keep blacks working for me, it’s because I have no other choice! All the same…] (86) Much like the nation, Freitas’ speech exposes a sinister relationship of dependence. Freitas shows a clear preoccupation or disquiet with the perceived ills and evils that slaves wreck upon the domestic space. The interlocutor does in fact intimate that slavery is a necessity, while underscoring the black body as a locus for transmittable disease and ill repute. As we have seen in chapter one, period supporters of slavery maintained that slavery as an institution was essential to the economic vitality of the Brazilian nation. In Freitas’ speech Azevedo curiously juxtaposes pro-slavery and abolitionist rhetoric, as both maintained that slavery brought deviant black bodies in dangerous contact with whites. The slave incited desire, causing white bodies to plunge to the lowest depth of their nature and commit egregiously shameful and impure acts. Azevedo employs Freitas’ speech as a means of revealing the paradoxical nature of these convergent discourses, in addition to employing the domestic race relations as metonymical for the national politics. These discussions aid to frame not only the place and discourse surrounding the black body, but generate a racial cartography in which the black body is constructed as direct antithesis— a pernicious, contagious element—and affirm the notion that blackness is not a lived condition, but is a representation. Here the interlocutors ensconce a direct distance between themselves and the black body. This narcissistic rapport of simultaneous affiliation and disaffiliation occurs while the partakers of these tête-à-têtes purposefully counterpose themselves as a means of establishing their place and whiteness as sources of authority and reformation. This exercise of mastery through language signifies the means by which the identity of the master is formed, and comes to

69

exist as a legitimated subject by virtue of his perpetual repudiation and profanation of the slave's body and autonomy. Sander Gilman has argued that this process through which bodies become “others” is a means through which personal/national anxiety is effectively exorcised and consequently given form in the body of the “other”: The objects in our world are reduced to images. No matter how well articulated, these images are constantly altered by our interaction with the realities upon which they are based…When, however, the sense of order and control goes under stress, when doubt is cast on the self’s ability to control the internalized world that it has created for itself, an anxiety appears which mirrors the earlier affective coloring of the period of individuation. We project that anxiety onto the Other, externalizing our loss of control. The Other is thus stereotyped, labeled with a set of signs paralleling of (mirroring) our loss of control. The Other is invested with all the qualities of the “bad” or the “good.” The “bad”, self with its repressed sadistic impulses, becomes the “bad: Other; the “good” self/object, with its infallible correctness, becomes the antithesis of the flawed image of the self, the self out of control. The “bad” Other becomes the negative stereotype; the “good” Other becomes the positive stereotype. The former is that which we fear to become; the latter, that which we fear we cannot achieve. (Gilman 173) 90 Therefore, it is important to perceive that black subjectivity or otherness is produced in discourse—a narrative both in dialectic and in disjuncture. In imagining the identity of a country or community, said country or community must equally imagine or establish a non- identity, a counter narrative. The construction of a political self demands the construction and deconstruction of narrative. This “antithesizing” is necessary to the stabilization of an espoused normative.

90

Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

70

Racial Transvestism In a rather curious scene, Azevedo gives the reader a glimpse into slave life outside of its servile capacity by juxtaposing the social gatherings of the enslaved with events given by the master class. These slave gatherings are anything but ordinary; rather, they take on a particular characteristic that I have delineated as racial transvestism. In these parties the slaves subvert the roles of slave and master through mimicry, and perform manifestations of dominant culture. Within the confines of slavery they forge a space, through costume and performance, in which to (re)fashion their bodies: E entraram a conversar sobre o escândalo das mulatas se prepararem tão bem como as senhoras. “Já se não contentavam com a sua saia curta e cabeção de renda; queriam vestido de cauda; em vez das chinelas, queriam botinas! Uma patifaria!” Depois falaram nos caixeiros, que roubavam do patrão para enfeitar as suas pininchas; e, por uma transição natural , estenderam a crítica até aos passeios a carro, às festas de largo e os bailes dos pretos. Os chinfrins, como lhes chamava o meu defunto Espigão, acudiu Maria do Carmo, conheço! ora se conheço!... Bastante quizília tivemos nós por amor deles!... É uma semvergonheira! Ver as escravas todas de cambraia, laços de fita, água de cheiro no lenço, a requebrarem as chandangas na dança!... Ah, um bom chicote!... disseram as duas velhas ao mesmo tempo.E elas dançam direito?... perguntou a do Carmo.Se dançam!... O serviço é que não sabem fazer a tempo e a horas! Lá para dançar estão sempre prontas! Nem o João Enxova! Até parecem senhoras, Deus me perdoe! Todas a se fazerem de gente! os negros a darem-lhes excelência. “E porque minha senhora pra cá! Vossa Senhoria pra lá!” É uma pouca vergonha, a senhora não imagina!... Uma vez, em que fui espiar um chinfrim, porque me disseram que o meu defunto estava lá metido, fiquei pasma! E o melhor é que os descarados não se tratam pelo nome deles, tratam-se pelo nome dos seus senhores!... Não sabe Filomeno?... aquele mulato do presidente?... Pois a esse só davam “Sr. Presidente!”. Outros são “Srs. Desembargadores, Doutores, Majores e Coronéis!”. Um desaforo que deveria acabar na palmatória da polícia! (82) [And they began to chat about the scandalous way the mulatto girls were doing themselves up just like white ladies. “They’re no longer happy with short skirts and lace collars. Now they want long dress and, and instead of slippers, they want high lace shoes, what frauds!!” They then conversed about the clerks who filched from their bosses in order to adorn their girl friends. And as a matter of course they extended their criticism even to carriage outings, festivals in the public squares, and dances for Negroes. “It’s really a shameless thing! To see the slave women decked out in cambric, ribbons and bows, with perfumed handkerchiefs, their time rear ends shaking in rhythm.“ Oh, for a good whip” mumbled one of the of ladies at the same time.“ And do they dance properly?:” asked Maria do Carmo.“ 71

Why certainly they do! It’s the housework they don’t know how to do punctually! But they’re always ready to go dancing!” Indignation parched her voice.“ They even look like real ladies, God forgive me! All of them making like they were us! The Negro men address them formally. First its ‘ma’am,’ then ‘my lady!’ It’s a real disgrace, you just can’t imagine! On one occasion I went to peep in on one of their shindigs, because someone told me my late husband was there, and I was astonished! But the worst is that the insolent things don’t even address each other by their own names, they use their masters’ names instead! Don’t you know about Filomeno, the provincial president’s mulatto? Well, the others address him always as ‘Mr. President!’ Then there are those who are ‘Mr. Judge,’ ‘Mr,. Doctor,’ ‘Mr. Major’ and ‘Mr.Colonel!’ an outrage the police ferule ought to put to a halt!] (88) In this dialogue, a clear distinction between black and white womanhood is drawn. This distinction or identity is constituted by the material veiling of the female body. The desire of the mulatas to appropriate white fashion can be interpreted as a form of political contestation. In this scene, clothing is metonymical for slavery as an institution, and this re-veiling of the body represents a deliberate refashioning of black subjectivity. The aesthetic quality of the performance of these parties is described by the interlocutors as a mere mise en abîme of whiteness. For J.L. Austin the slave-master relationship is initiated, made intelligible, and upheld through repeated, ritual enactments of its script and spectacle (Austin 15).91 In this sense, by professing these (re)fashionings to be fraudulent, the interlocutors suggest that whiteness as antithesis of blackness can only be conceived through mimicry.92 Azevedo brings this display from the private to the public further by challenging racial demarcations of space. They contest their isolation and (re)-create society by the subversion of public/national space. By consciously creating sites of black agency, resistance and expression, they provisionally challenge their relation to slave-space. Spatiality, according to Merleau-Ponty and others such as Eugene Minkowski working out of existentialist thought, privileges the body as

91

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. I am arguing that the white female interluctors express that black slaves can only achieve whiteness through mimicry. 92

72

the site of the production of self. As Ato Sekyi-Otu points out, human spatiality and human embodiment are intimately linked in existentialist thought. 93 The communion of dress and body represent the temporary subversion of social order, which according to the white women should be punished by the whip. The Black Female Abject At the center of the novel Azevedo relates ostensibly the most gruesome and visceral scene in the narrative: the torture of Domingas. Taking heed of Quitéria’s incessant threats of injury and vehement hatred for Domingas and Raimundo, José sets out for the city to procure a safe space for Raimundo in the house of his brother, Manuel. Upon his return he is confronted with the brutal torture of his slave-mistress Domingas: Seu negreiro! gritava ela ao marido, fula de raiva. Você pensa que lhe deixarei criar, em minha companhia, os filhos que você tem das negras?... Era só também o que faltava! Não trate de despachar-me, quanto antes, o moleque, que serei eu quem o despacha, mas há de ser para ali, para junto da capela!José, que sabia perfeitamente de quanto ela era capaz, correu logo à vila para dar as providências necessárias à segurança do filho. Mas, ao voltar à fazenda, gritos horrorosos atraíram-no ao rancho dos pretos, entrou descoroçoado e viu o seguinte: Estendida por terra, com os pés no tronco, cabeça raspada e mãos amarradas para trás, permanecia Domingas, completamente nua e com as partes genitais queimadas a ferro em brasa. Ao lado, o filhinho de três anos, gritava como um possesso, tentando abraçá-la, e, de cada vez que ele se aproximava da mãe, dois negros, à ordem de Quitéria, desviavam o relho das costas da escrava para dardejá-lo contra a criança. A megera, de pé, horrível, bêbada de cólera, ria-se, praguejava obscenidades, uivando nos espasmos flagrantes da cólera. Domingas, quase morta, gemia, estorcendo-se no chão. O desarranjo de suas palavras e dos seus gestos denunciava já sintomas de loucura.(23) [“You nigger lover!” she shouted at her husband, contorted with rage. “If you think I’d permit you to bring up in my home those children begot from the Negresses! That’s the last straw! And don’t try to get rid of me! I’m the one who’ll do the getting rid of –that black boy!—and it will be over there, at the side of the chapel!” José, who knew perfectly well the extremes of which she was capable, flew off to the village to take the measures necessary for the child’s safety. But, on returning to the ranch, 93

Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience .Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

73

the horrible cries drew him to the slave quarters. Heartsick, he entered and saw the following: Stretched out on the ground with her feet in the stocks, head shaved and hands behind her, lay Domingas, completely naked and with parts of her genitals burned by a hot iron. Off to one side her little three-year-old son screamed like one possessed, as he attempted to embrace her. Each time he approached his mother, two slaves, on Quitéria’s orders, would flick the whip away from Domingas’s back and direct it against the child. The shrew, hideous and drunk with rage, stood there laughing, hurling obscenities and howling with spasms of rage. Domingas, half dead, lay groaning and her uncoordinated gestures already denoted symptoms of insanity.] (63) Indeed Domingas’ crime is having committed the hellacious violation of the ideology of white womanhood. Though, ostensibly, women were considered both the property of their husbands and families, Aluísio underscores the significant position of white women in the propagation of violence and their active investment in propagating and solidifying white supremacy. In a sense violence and culture are midwives for one another. The histories, ideologies, beliefs we deem cultures are founded, concretized through and accompanied by the practice of imposition. Culture exists and prevails in and upon some degree of disproportionate influence of systemic violence that has at its core the imposition of some other practice, belief, or ideology. In addition to Aluísio, nineteenth century writer Machado de Assis, in his much-noted story “O Caso da Vara” advances a very complex view of nineteenth century white womanhood. Both fundamentally resist the fallacy of seeing slave mistresses as mere victims of white patriarchal domination, but unbosom their complicit role as agents of violence and racial domination vis-à-vis enslaved black women. They convey that race and the privilege that it bequeathed were indeed a severe impediment to human compassion. Machado and Azevedo suggest to us that while slavery, albeit considered an institution built on white male desire, its practice was sustained by the conscious compliance, participation and desire of white women.

74

Historian Mary Karasch, in her exhaustive study of Brazilian slavery in Rio de Janiero provides evidence of the pervasive nature of intra-gender relations between white mistresses and black female slaves: Weech escreve sobre um amigo que via a vizinha bater nos escravos todas as noites na varanda, num espetáculo que durava geralmente três horas. Ao visitar o amigo, Weech pode observá-la pessoalmente desferindo quase cinqüenta palma toadas em uma escrava, e chicoteando uma menina de quinze anos cujas mãos estavam inchadas, porque ela rogara não ser batida com a palmatória. (Karasch 173)94 [Weech writes about a friend who saw his neighbor beat her slaves on the porch every night, a spectacle that often lasted three hours. While visiting his friend, Weech could see her in person striking almost fifty lashes to a slave and whipping a fifteen year old girl whose hands were swollen, because she had asked to not be hit with the95 palmatória.96] In turn, Gilberto Freyre, in his founding text Casa Grande e Senzala, adds: Quanto à maior crueldade das senhoras que dos senhores no tratamento dos escravos é fato geralmente observado nas sociedades escravocratas. Confirmam-no os nossos cronistas. Os viajantes, o folclore, a tradição oral. Não só dois nem três, porém muitos os casos de crueldade de senhoras de engenho Contra escravos inermes. Sinhá-moças que mandavam arrancar os olhos de mucamas bonitas e trazê-los à presença do marido, à hora. da sobremesa, dentro da compoteira de doce e boiando em sangue ainda fresco. Baronesas já de idade que por ciúme ou despeito mandavam vender mulatinhas de quinze anos a velhos libertinos. Outras que espatifavam a salto de botina dentaduras de escravas; ou mandavamlhes cortar os peitos, arrancar as unhas, queimar a cara ou as orelhas. Toda uma série de judiarias. o motivo, quase sempre, o ciúme do marido. O rancor sexual. A rivalidade de mulher com mulher.(Freyre 503)97 [As to the mistresses’ being more cruel than the masters in their treatment of the slaves, that is a fact generally to be observed in slave-owning societies, and is one that is confirmed by our chroniclers, by foreign travelers, by folklore, and by tradition. There are not two or three but many instances of the cruelty of the ladies of the Big House toward their helpless blacks. There are tales of sinhá-moças who had the eyes of pretty mucumas gouged out and then had them served to their husbands for dessert, in a jelly-dish, floating in blood that was still fresh. Tales of young baronesses of adult age who out of jealousy or spite had fifteen-year-old mulatto girls sold off to old libertines. There were other who kicked out the teeth of their women slaves with their boots, or who had their breasts cut off, their nails drawn, or their faces and ears burned. A whole series of tortures. And the 94

Karasach, Mary. A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850, trans. Pedro Maia Soares (São Paolo): Companhia das Letras, 2000. 95 The palmátoria was a tool of torture often used to strike the hands of slaves. 96 Translation mine. 97 Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-Grande & Senzala.Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro, 1998.

75

motive, almost always, was jealousy of the husband. Sexual rancor. The rivalry of woman with woman.] (Freyre 351)98 Frederico Burlamaqui in Mémoria Analýtica acerca do commércio d’escravos e acerca da escravidão doméstica [Analytic Memoir of slave trafficking and domestic slavery] further contends: “as phrases mais communs quando huma mulher desconfia que seu marido, ou seu amante, tem contactos illicitos com alguma escrava só: eu a frigirei, eu a assarei, lhe queimarei e ou cortarei tal ou tal parte & C. E quantas vezes estas ameaças não vão a effeito mesmo por simples desconfianças.” [Among us, in the early years of the last century, “the most common phrases, when a woman is suspicious of her husband or her lover, are” ‘I’ll have her fried, I’ll roast her alive, I’ll burn her, or I’ll cut out such and such part,’ etc. And how many times are these threats even put into execution, and all because of mere suspicion.]99

In the North American context, African American historian Nell Irvin Painter links evidence of sexual liaisons between white masters and black female slaves with Freud's 1912 essay "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," in which the Viennese doctor described upper-class men's compartmentalization of their personal lives (Painter 11011).100 Such men reserved love for their wives but directed their sexual desire toward the debased women of the lower classes. Painter concludes by encouraging us to reexamine American history through family history and to acknowledge that white women often saw themselves as the "losers in competition with women who, though black and poor and powerless, seemed somehow more attractive"(Painter 111). Painter notes that this rivalry "helps explain the thorniness of women's contacts across the color line across the entire twentieth century” (Painter 111). 98

Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves .Casa-Grande & Senzala: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. 2d English language, rev ed. New York: Knopf, 1968; 1956. 99 Burlamaqui Leopoldo Cesar. Mémoria Analýtica acerca do commércio d’escravos e acerca da escravidão doméstica.Rio da Janeiro,1837. 100 Painter Irvin Nell. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

76

A young Raimundo is forced to bear witness to torture. It is here, paradoxically that their lives, beyond the sanguine kinship of mother and son, are inextricably fettered. This scene of abjection equally creates a physical and psychic fissure in which Raimundo’s initial displacement is pronounced. He and Domingas are further brutalized for his desire to save her. The violence of this scene rests in its conflicting definitions or motivations of viewership and desire. For the agents to regard abjection is pleasurable, as white bodies within the slave regime served as institutional actors—propagators of a perversion, a pleasure, a cruelty inherent to their espoused collective identity. Shame and defilement inherently attend Kristeva’s conceptualization of abjection. Shame also, I would argue, attends the position of blackness in a white supremacist reality—shame precisely in and as one of the terms for abjection in a white supremacist symbolic. Laura Mulvey understands this concomitant narrative of explicit and implicit debasement and shame as central to the abjection of the female body. The gendered conflation of femaleness and the abject is rooted in her place within the symbolism of the maternal: The woman “first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it (Mulvey 1).101 What I want to emphasize is that Domingas’ torture and Raimundo’s visual-psychic trauma and eventual murder, constitute and avow the dialectical economy of the individual as agential or symbol of the collective. The inherent violence of desire is both its individuality and malleability, thus the object and fate of “desire” within the realm of institution is protean or

101

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” in Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975.

77

chameleon-like being signified within the powers of the implicit spectator. The linkage between Raimundo and his mother is further ensconced, in that an empirical knowledge of race is established, relating black woman and motherhood with pain and abjection.

In Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting, Painter employs insights from modern psychology to reexamine the long-term human cost of slavery, both to slaves and slaveholders. Painter argues that denying slaves "psychological personhood" skews not only the history of slavery but the history of the United States as a whole. Drawing on psychiatric literature, Painter notes that people, especially children, who have been severely sexually, emotionally, and physically abused often suppress their own emotions and submerge their identities in those of their abusers, a process psychiatrists call "soul murder." She argues that soul murder was part and parcel of the antebellum political economy of the southern United States, which was founded on the violence of slavery. Raimundo’s experience of bearing witness to his mother’s torture is so traumatic that it is seemingly displaced from his memory. Blacks experienced soul murder as a result of the brutality of slavery, but Painter suggests that whites did not go undamaged: white wives had to accept patriarchy and put up with their husbands' adultery in the slave quarters, while white children grew up watching scenes of violent abuse and, as adults, recapitulated the patterns they had been taught. While slaves developed a counterculture of family, community, and religion that offered alternative sources of dignity and selfworth, white women and children had no way out. Moreover, the violence within slave-owning families spilled over into southern society at large, producing the South's infamous culture of violence. 102

102

Painter, Nell Irvin. Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting.Waco, Texas: Markham Press Fund, 1995.

78

The violent spectacularity of this scene equally has the intent of fomenting genderedracial history, as it is through Domingas’ torture that the doctrine of white woman ruling over black woman is concretized. Ideologies of white womanhood were articulable and meaningful only in relation to slave women's experience. The subjugation of black bodies in slavery and the attribution of social and sexual deviance onto black bodies served as a fundament to the conception of whiteness. In other words, throughout the nineteenth century whiteness was imagined, articulated, and concretized through its opposition to the specter of the black sexual deviant. Moreover, for the viewers of the subjection, chiefly Raimundo, the visual nature of the spectacle is meant to perform and (re) produce an empirical knowledge of race and power by which his physical and emotional identification with his mother’s abjected-pained-black body serves as a means of creating a specter of his own raced condition. In this scene the abject becomes central to the formation of Raimundo’s black subjectivity. Abjection substantiates the articulation of subject-object relations: the subject is constructed by the relationship with objects, as the two reciprocally bring one another into being. Abjection is experienced in the domain where the development of the subject-object relations is obstructed or errs —thus thwarting the subject from making its normal manifestation. For Julia Kristeva, abjection is a universal experience in the developmental trajectory of the subject. By this account, abjection establishes itself in the development of subject-object relations: the subject is produced by relation with object, as two are mutually constitutive. Where the development of object relations “strays,” the “normal” subject fails to appear, and is unable to demarcate from its putative objects. This straying or transient failure is part of the process of encountering language (Kristeva 49). In the formation of the black subject this encounter or 79

collision with the language of racialized slavery and white supremacy articulate and embodies the very contours of black abjection. The inflicted pain felt by the pained body is not merely a seizure of agency, but an affirmation of Lacanian disavowal in both the political (through discourse), and the material sense. The inherent abjection of torture lies in the pleasure derived in the disfiguration of the subject. The “call and response” quality of black abjection subsists in the linguistic and physical collisions that form and (de)-form black subjectivity. This locution constitutes the perpetual porno-troping of blackness within institution. In this scene Domingas is being sexually humiliated and rendered abject—she is being thrust into the condition of being a black enslaved woman, where racialization, gendering, and enslavement are all occurring in conjunction, in one physicalized event, evidencing that disavowal does not merely occur in discourse, but it is necessarily rendered visual.103 If we take Derrida’s assertion that all communication is derived from discourse, we might ascertain that it is by virtue of the connubiality of visual and material violence that the implicit language undergirding Domingas’ pornographic abjection is made manifest.104

Painter compares this white supremacist rhetoric to pornography, noting that the "pornographic mind" creates scenarios of dehumanization and degradation. White supremacists evoked pathologies of sex and fear because it served their political and social ends: the creation and maintenance of a powerless working class (Painter 132). 105 Laura Kipnis points out that pornography acts as a form of “political theater” where social and cultural ideologies of desire

103

What I am suggesting here is that enactment of torture is essentially a performance of discourse— a simultaneous act performance of language and defilement for abjected body and the abjector. 104 Derrida, Jacques. De La Grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967. 105 Painter Nell Irvin. Southern History Across the Color Line.

80

and taboo are staged and manipulated as sexual norms and categories are simultaneously upheld and transgressed. Kipinis furthers observes that because pornography functions as a “festival of infractions,” its “allegories of transgression reveal, in the most visceral way, not only our cultural edges, but how intricately our own identities are bound up in all of these quite unspoken, but relentless, cultural dictates”(Kipnis 210).106

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell notes: First of all, perhaps the dirtiest secret of white racism is its eroticization of dominance: its sexual sadism. If we cannot acknowledge the fact that we get off on brutalization, and that our ancestors associated orgasm with the whip and the threat of the whip, then we cannot penetrate the heart of whiteness. Very few people will acknowledge to themselves, much less to others, still less to their victims, that cruelty is pleasurable, but the whole history of American race relations is incomprehensible without that acknowledgement. (Sartwell 79)107 Pornographic pleasure, or more concretely the materialization of pleasure informs us of the ruses of power, by relating who can access it, how that pleasure is received, and more importantly, which body or bodies are inscribed in its production or materialization. We might think of pleasure, then as a perpetual narrative construction of the self by which desire political, or otherwise is (in) scribed. If we consider the disembodiment of the black female body under the universe of slavery placed as the symbolic object, a non-person, non-human we can understand its centrality in production of white pleasure. Mulvey further argues that: “woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 2). It is the

106

Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1999. 107 Sartwell, Crispin. Act Like You Know: African American Autobiography and White Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

81

usurpation of language and self- articulation of this imposed symbolic order that forecloses the black body’s ability to create and appropriate its own meaning. In her study of Fredrick Douglass’ autobiography, Saidiya V. Hartman analyzes what he references as the “bloodstained gate.”108 According to Hartman, the “bloodstained gate” through which Douglass and other black people passed in order to become slaves was the whipping post (at once a phallic and vaginal symbol). As a metaphor for female genitalia ravaged by violation and childbirth, “the bloodstained gate” refers also to the institutional pattern of slave rape. It was not simply the whipping post but the violence, the illegitimacy, and the inchoateness of rape that produced the body, the status, and the (non)identity of the slave. Therefore, it must be understood that for black bodies to desire to belong also means to recognize that black bodies have desire and by extension will, and that the asserting of such will would destabilize its place within the production of white pleasure. The scene of torture thus affirms societal positions and raced hierarchies. The constitution of the spectator and actor predicates a clear delineation between the right to torture and disavowal of agency, by which each lash of the whip and striking of the branding iron is affirmation of the Self in relation and in disjuncture to the pained body. Slavery as an institution granted to all whites, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, the full-fledged legal right and personal unregulated authority to exploit, consume, and destroy the slave's psyche and body in whatever ways they desired. However, in thinking of national identity or belonging as fashioned by the participation or performance of national ritual, the site of the abjected black female body urges a consideration of its place within national/communal performances of identity. In so doing, one must consider the ways in which one participates and the mise en place or spacial implications of 108

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

82

this participation. These scenes of subjection evidence her concomitant inclusion and exclusion within the creation and fashioning of a national narrative. Her place and conflation with the spectacular positions her at the very axis of national ritual where she exists for others and not for herself. In this performance of nation, her body serves as the terrain upon which the language of racial violence is given form.109 The fulfillment of desire is dually constitutive in this scene. It is through the material rape and castration of Domingas’ body that the symbolic is articulated. By enlisting two black slaves to torture Domingas, Quitéria places the black male body, or colored body as interposseser and interstitial agent of torture, further crystallizing the notion that the black body is fettered to the production and realization of white pleasure and desire. For Lacan, the pervert intentionally assumes the position of the object-instrument of the volonté-de-jouissance, which is not his own will but that of the big Other. (Lacan 185)110The pervert does not pursue his activity for his own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of the big Other. He finds enjoyment precisely in this instrumentalization, in working for the enjoyment of the Other; ‘the subject here makes himself the instrument of the Other’s ‘jouissance.’ In sadism/masochism the subject locates himself as

109

Hortense Spillers underscores black subjectivity as perpetually subject to and at the mercy of exterior desire— a pleasure external to themselves. She maintains “The flesh is the concentration of “ethnicity” that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away. It is this “flesh” and “blood” entity, in the vestibule (or “preview”) of a colonized North America, that is essentially ejected from “ The Female Body in Western Culture,” but it makes a good theory, or commemorative “herstory” to want to “forget,: or to have failed to realize, that the African female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape—in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males. A female body strung from a tree limb, or bleeding from the breast on any given day of field work because the “overseer,” standing the length of a whip, has popped her flesh open, adds a lexical and living dimension to the narratives of women in culture and society. This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh “ungendered”—offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.” (207) 110 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964.

83

the object of the invocatory drive.” (Lacan 320)111 In her work on sadomasochism, Jessica Benjamin asserts that sadomasochism “replicates quite faithfully the themes of the master-slave relationship. Here subjugation takes the form of transgressing against the other's body, violating his physical boundaries.” This abuse, she argues, is necessary for the master to experience both the separation (or differentiation) and the recognition that are so central to subjective development. The master's self defined always against a separate, subjugated other is formed, legitimated, made autonomous and powerful through direct (physical and sexual) domination of that other (Benjamin 70).112 The branding iron or bacalhau as phallic symbol and machination of institutional power, searingly renders a rape of Domingas’ flesh. Abdul R. JanMohamed argues that: "Rape is simultaneously the metonymy of the process of oppressive racist control ... and a metaphor for the construction of the racialized subject. Regardless of gender, the racialized subject is always already constructed as a 'raped' subject.... Rape thus subsumes the totality of force relations on the racial border, which is in fact always a sexual border." (JanMohamed 109)113 More than merely a condition of black women's experience under slavery, rape serves as a valuable means of conceiving and describing the position and experience of black people as whole under slavery's brutal regime. Lacanian psychoanalytic purports the notion that the Phallus, absent or present, is the marker of gender and thus identity. The Phallus is the symbol of patriarchal authority—those who possess it have within their power the exercise of mastery, over themselves, over “weaker” 111

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988. 113 JanMohamed, Abdul. “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright and the Articulation of 'Racialized Sexuality.'" Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to Aids. Ed. Domna Stanton. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1992. 112

84

men not in possession of the Phallus, over women. (Scott 101)114 By the enactment of sexualized torture, Quitéria through her espoused racial identity performs an act of phallocentristic power— thus taking in her possession the implicit phallus and the power and pleasure it affords. This can be evidenced in the orgasmic effect that is produced in the female spectator/actress. Judith Butler has suggested that: ““Being” the Phallus and “having” the Phallus denote divergent sexual positions…For women to “be the Phallus means, then, to reflect the power of the Phallus…to “embody” the Phallus, to supply the site to which it penetrates...The interdependency of these positions recalls the Hegelian structure of…the unexpected dependency of the master on the slave in order to establish his own identity in reflection” (Butler 160).115 Both the men who enact the torture, and Quitéria who promulgates it, produce perversion on the level of the individual, but in the name of the collective Other. Thus, it is in the dislocation of desire from the self, the moment of the performative- projection, that jouissance is derived. If we take Fanon’s assertion that the Negro is always perceived at the genital level116, as is the site of Domingas’ torture, I would argue that its position further affirms the idea of the black body as an empirical and epistemic place, in and through which knowledge is perceived and ascertained. Through deed, performance, participation, and acting upon, a realization of the self is attained. The site of torture constructs an economy of transference. We should see the black body as object as a tabula rasa that (be) comes both the consequence and agent provocateur of its own abjection. The pleasure of abjection as a performance of racial membership innately lies in the act of projection. 114

Scott, Darieck. Extravagent Abjection: Blackness, Power and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. 115 Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. 116 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

85

The pornographic-abject is made most evident in Quitéria’s purposeful burning of Domingas’ genitalia. Quitéria attacks her servant’s productive organs, equally seeking her vengeful pleasure in the domain of the sexual. She sadistically attacks Domingas’ body to cause Domingas to become disfigured in a way intended to lessen her desirability to other men and, ultimately, to destroy her confidence as an agent in her own (sexual) life. The sexual organ, of which a bastard child was born, is now brutalized and desecrated as object of pleasure and jouissance of the slave mistress. Indeed the first sexual revolution, as Sharon Holland reminds us, occurred under auspices of American slavery, and the memory of it is “lodged in the psyches of all Americans” (Holland 120).

117

In that revolution, black men as well as black women were

the sites, the ground on which that revolution was waged. But this abjection is more than the pay back of a “woman scorned.” By attacking her sexual organ and positioning the fruit of her loins as spectator, she performs the power of her gendered whiteness, thus making a clear disidentification between herself and Domingas based on racialized agency, thus locating white female sexual pleasure in the unbridled torture of the black female abject. 118 While racial slavery allowed for the total exploitation of black bodies in whatever gendered capacity, it concurrently and paradoxically repudiated distinctions in gender among black people. Enslaved black men were feminized by virtue of their subjugation as slaves, the regularity with

117

Holland Patricia Sharon. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham. NC. Duke University Press, 2000. 118 In underscoring the dialectical economy of “use” and “signification” for black captive bodies, Spillers notes: “This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor; (3) in this distance from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “ otherness”; (4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general “ powerlessness,” resonating through various centers of human meaning.”(474)

86

which many were castrated, and the denial of patriarchal and citizenship rights. Enslaved black women were masculinized by virtue of their back-breaking labor on par with black men and their being denied male protection and provision. Judith Butler’s succinct reading of the psychoanalytic notion of disidentification is of interest as she maintains that any process of identification always involves a disavowal, a disidentification with something deemed to be opposite, something rendered abject. Per Butler: “butch cannot be butch unless she throws out everything femme about herself; white cannot be white unless it throws out everything it considers black and projects it outward; man cannot be a man unless he abjects the feminine. Yet this disavowal holds the very thing being repudiated in intimate relationship to the identity; unresolved, the attempted abjection results in a kind of melancholy, a repressed but constantly returning wish for what has been repudiated (Butler 162).119 Disavowal is multifarious as it is both an act of recognition and abrogation—a distancing and affiliation. This recognition is both a reconnaissance of the Other and the Self, but above all, the Self in relation to the Other. As such, the performativity of desire within institution locates the body as antithesis within the realms of a tenuous symbolic order. The black body in pain thus forges a communion between the virtual and the real, the material and the symbolic. To this end, Hortense Spillers makes a critical distinction between the body and the flesh: But I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealed under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social 119

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex".

87

irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness... (Spillers 206) Spillers’ meditations on the distinction between the “body” and the “flesh” position both as mutually informing and mutually constitutive entities in the making of the black subject. For Spillers, the flesh is the terrain upon which pain and the perversion of discourse are inflicted; the body however, is that which commits to consciousness and memory the trauma of injury. The body re-members the violations against the flesh, serving as the intersection between material pain, memory and consciousness. It is precisely the infliction of the flesh that constitutes the abjected/ pained subject’s lived narrative. This scene inextricably links Raimundo’s and Domingas’ bodies through violence; her abjection and torture delineates and foreshadows his material and symbolic disavowal. Within the framework of miscegenation, the fate of the black male body is always determined by the location, and more precisely domination of the black female body in relation to white men. In the universe of slavery, there exists a foreclosure of paternity. The inherent paradox subsists in that while there persists an ardent investment in patriarchy, the paternity associated with the figure is of little importance. The privilege of ownership sanctions the avowal and disavowal of property/ progeny. Throughout the narrative, Azevedo advances the claim that one’s societal location or dislocation is determined matrilineanly. This idea equally appears in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave published 1845. In his narrative, Douglass laments his position as a male child born to a white father, and therefore rightful heir to wealth, property, and citizenship, but robbed of his just inheritance because he was born to a black woman whose

88

status decided his own (14).120It was the centrality of black women to establishing kinship and heritage that determined Douglass's status as inhuman, illegitimate, slave. Hortense Spillers describes the enslaved black woman as the “principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a cunning difference visually, psychologically, ontologically as the route by which the dominant modes decided the distinction between the self and 'other” (155). To concretize the institution of slavery and the idea(l) of the nation as white woman, the black woman and her offspring must remain as direct antithesis. In this sense, I am suggesting that to understand O Mulato, it must be discerned that Raimundo’s racial and political subjectivity is articulated and derived from Domingas’ body proper, in dialectic with the narrative of abject black womanhood. The relation of interracial rape and intragender violence was a critical fundament to the development of slave subjectivity. As such, the slave was not simply the victim of sexual deviance but its very embodiment. Though the image of his mother’s torture escapes his consciousness and memory, his position at the side of her abjected body remains unchanged and unaffected within the memory of the societal and the unveiling of his future. Raimundo “The Unlikely Mulato” Several critiques of this work have considered Raimundo to be an “unlikely” mulatto, focusing in great part on the author’s descriptions of his physical features. 121As the novel describes him: “Raimundo tinha vinte e seis anos e seria um tipo acabado de brasileiro se não

120

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2e. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 2004. 121 Cordeiro, João Mendonça. O Mulato, 1881-1981 :Cem Anos De Um Romance revolucionário. 1 Vol. São LuísMa.: Universidade Federal do Maranhão, 1987.

89

foram os grandes olhos azuis, que puxara do pai. Cabelos muito pretos lustrosos e crespos; tez morena e amulatada, mas fina; dentes claros que reluziam sob a negrura do bigode; estatura alta e elegante; pescoço largo, nariz direito e fronte espaçosa. (54) [Raimundo was twenty-six years old and would have been a typical Brazilian had it not been for his large blue eyes, which resembled those of his father. His hair was very black, shiny and curly, his complexion dark and mulatto-like, but delicate. His white teeth sparkled under his black moustache. Tall and elegant in build, he had a strong neck, a straight nose, and a broad forehead.] (56) Many writers of the nineteenth century, as in the North American abolitionist literary tradition, are said to have whitened their personages to incite sympathy or an affective affiliation in white readers122; however, this to me seems rather reductionist, and assuredly not the case of Azevedo’s O Mulato. I would argue that the creation of the “unlikely” nature of this mulatto was indeed an essential element to Azevedo’s overarching mediation on racial politics and national identity in Brazil. Azevedo’s mulatto combines the problematic of corporeality and identity for national identity and its dialectic with slave emancipation. Azevedo shows that the miscigenated body presents a formidable challenge to racialist conventions of perceiving the body. The miscigenated body as a marker of both origin and identity undermines the assurance with which difference can be read. In examining the interconnectedness between the North American historical narrative and existence of the mixed race body Spillers has defined the mulatto accordingly: Created to provide a middle ground of latitude between “ black” and “ white,” the customary and permissible binary agencies of national adventure, mulatto being, as a neither/ nor proposition, inscribed no historic locus, or materiality, that was other than 122

For more information regarding mixed race characters in American literature see: Werner Sollors’ Neither Black nor White Yet both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law.

90

evasive and shadowy on the national landscape. To that extent, the mulatto/a embodied an alibi, and excuse for “other/ otherness” that dominant culture could not (cannot now either) appropriate, or wish away. An accretion of sign that embody the “unspeakable,” of the very thing that the dominant culture would forget, the mulatto/a, as term, designates a disguise, a cover up, in the century of Emancipation and beyond, of the social and political reality of the dreaded African presence. Behind the African-become –Americans stands the shadow, the unsubstantial “double” that the culture dreamed in the place of that humanity transformed into its profoundest challenge and by the impositions of policy, its deepest “un-American” activity…I am suggesting that in the stillness of time and space eventuated by the “mulatto/a”—its apparent sameness of fictional, historical, and autobiographical content—we gain insight into the theft of the dynamic of principle of living that distinguishes from his/ her objectification. The questionable paternity of the mulatto character in fiction, just as its parallel in the historical sequence, marks the beginning and end of cultural and symbolic illegitimacy…In a very real sense, America’s historic mulatto subject plays out dimensions of the spectacular and the specular. In his/ her face, the deceits of culture are mirrored; the deeds of a secret and unnamed fatherhood made known. America’s “tragic mulatto” exists for others—and a particular male other—in an attribution of the illicit that designates the violent mingling and commingling of bloodlines that a simplifies cultural patrimony wished to deny. But in that very denial, the most dramatic and visible of admissions is evident. (Spillers 307) This indiscernablity of the flesh, this body that seeps under the radar of the cultural seeing by skin color, a man who could both be ‘perceived’ as white by virtue of his outward appearance, education and social standing, aides as means to penetrate the very core of the Brazilian miscegenation mythology. Miscegenation, therefore functions not to obfuscate but render visible, and I would also add the desire to know and distinguish difference. The supposed blurring of racial lines reifies and concretizes the idea of disparate racial identity and its very presence persists as an allusion to the notion of racial purity. Raimundo cannot “pass” for the potential threat that he poses. His “pé na cozinha” [foot in the kitchen] serves as narrative fodder as it reveals paradoxically a Brazil boasts that miscegenation and nonlinear racial categorization, but is obsessed with “racial inventory.” For to deracialize bodies, render them ambiguous; to fall out of racial categories is to risk that those bodies would pursue power.

It must be noted that the social reality that Azevedo constructs in O Mulato chronicles the last years of Brazilian slavery, and more precisely when the Brazilian population had reached an 91

unprecedented degree of miscegenation. In this period several “products” of this miscegenation had become well established in various branches of Brazilian society. Race prejudice during this time period became more pervasively and insidiously articulated amongst those who perceived these mixed race subjects as competition. The dispute over the mixed race subject, or more precisely against them, becomes emblematic of Atlantic societies that were built, constructed and maintained by the institution of slavery. The mulatto who gained access to education and who inhabited traditionally “white-only” spaces challenged and dismantled the very premise of the rhetoric of black inferiority. And societies such as Brazil and the United States that begrudgingly did not want to end slavery and the advantages therein derived, the misceganted body served as specter and a witness to and of the American narrative of violence.

Through the creation of informal discourse Azevedo again and again informs the reader of national attitudes toward the mulatto. In the following, two interlocutors intimate the mulatto to possess a certain “habilidade” [ability], yet, fortunately its tainted blood proves to be an insurmountable impasse:

Habilidade?... segredou outro, com o mistério de quem revela uma coisa proibida. Talento! digo-lhe eu! Esta raça cruzada é a mais esperta de todo o Brasil! Coitadinhos dos brancos se ela pilha uma pouca de instrução e resolve fazer uma chinfrinada. Então é que vai tudo pelos ares! Felizmente não lhe dão muita ganja! (212) [“Ability?” whispered another, with the secretiveness of someone revealing a prohibited thing. “Talent! I tell you, that mixed race is the craftiest in all Brazil! Pity the white if these types pilfer a little book learning and go out and raise hell! That’s when everything will come crashing down! Thank goodness they’re not given much of a chance!”] (220) As these interlocutors are indeed all proud, direct descendants, if not Portuguese themselves, Azevedo gestures toward the notion that these discourses of race prejudice are in fact vestiges of Portuguese colonialism, too insidiously espoused and perpetuated by Brazilians.

92

Scholar and critic Nelson H. Vieira has convincingly argued that Azevedo’s O Mulato could be inserted in a stream of 19th century Lusophobia, that as he demonstrates appears in the intentional oft grotesque depictions of the Portuguese as dirty, corrupt and uncouth, a trope to also appear in Azevedo’s later work O Cortiço [The Slum].123 Azevedo attributes this state of national decadence to the presence and backwards ideology of the Portuguese. Curiously, while the Portuguese construct the slaves as the source of all things evil, Azevedo views the slave, and particularly the mulatto as the embodiment of Brazil—a body in constant conflict with competing interests and investments in white supremacy. The mulatto figure as the carnal embodiment of Brazil’s racial history was a notion widely espoused among 19th century Brazilian intellectuals.124 However, it is crucial to mention that there was not a general consensus as to how mixed race bodies should be constructed and depicted in national literature. Azevedo’s O Mulato seemingly shows us the paradox of a country that recognizes its multiracial heritage, but maintains a keen investment in veiling and silencing it. Michel Rolph-Trouillot defines this silence as an active and transitive process. One silences, he affirms “a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the process of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active, he maintains, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis” (Rolph-Trouillot 48).125 O Mulato, aides in the critical examination of the notions of nation and freedom. This text relentlessly places in relief the question of freedom and how its definition is in constant dialectic with the definition of nation and the bodies that inhabit it. To this end, we might query 123

See Nelson H. Vieira’s Brasil e Portugal: A Imagem Recíproca. Lisboa, Portugal. Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa. 1991. 124 For a cohesive analysis of race and miscegenation amongst nineteenth century intellectuals see Thomas E. Skidmore’s: Black into White Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. 125 Trouillot Rolph-Michel, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Mass. Beacon Press, 1995.

93

if freedom is defined by birth, and I would add the nature of one’s birth, that is how do raced bodies negotiate these distinctions within the political? As Hodes has noted, the progeny of mixed race liaisons confused the equation of freedom with whiteness and blackness with bondage (Hodes 40). 126 Conversely, I would argue that O Mulato urges us to consider that the mixed-race male body does not seem to escape this paradigm; rather it enforces the notion of freedom as an inheritance, rather than a legitimate legal right. As we have discussed, our first physical encounter with Raimundo is at the site of Domingas’ torture. This placement is not gratuitous, but further aids in the construction of Raimundo’s narrative. His mother’s torture and his concomitant visual trauma, a trauma so unspeakable that it is repressed in his memory, serving the impetus and conduit of his physical and psychic transience throughout the narrative. Sartre, in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, illuminates the relation between terror and resistance, and their cohabitation in the same body, when he describes the revolutionary native as a “child of violence,” whose humanity is found and wrested from the depths of the “torture and death” to which he has been subjected. “Hardly has the second generation [of natives] opened their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their father flogged,” Sartre writes. “In psychiatric terms, they’ve been ‘traumatized’ for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction” (Sartre 437-39).127 Sent to Portugal at young age, Raimundo is essentially viewed by the Portuguese and his school mates as Brazilian; yet, it is indispensible for us to note that this connection to land that outsiders assign to him remains intrinsically tied to the repression of his mother’s abjected body: 126

Hodes,Martha Elizabeth. White women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 127 Sartre, Jean-Paul; translated by Hazel E. Barnes Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge, 2003.

94

Em toda a sua vida, sempre longe da pátria, entre povos diversos, cheia de impressões diferentes tomada de preocupações de estudos, jamais conseguira chegar a uma dedução lógica e satisfatória a respeito da sua procedência. Não sabia ao certo quais eram as circunstâncias em que viera ao mundo não sabia a quem devia agradecer a vida e os bens de que dispunha... "Sua mãe, porém, quem seria?..." Talvez alguma senhora culpada e receosa de patentear a sua vergonha!... "Seria boa? Seria virtuosa?... " (70) Depois destas e outras divagações pelo passado, Raimundo, se bem que muito novo ainda, punha-se a pensar e os véus misteriosos da sua infância assombravam-lhe já o coração com uma tristeza vaga e obscura, numa perplexidade cheia de desgosto. Todo o seu desejo era correr aos braços de Mariana e pedir-lhe que lhe dissesse, por amor de Deus, quem afinal vinha a ser seu pai e, principalmente, sua mãe. [During his entire life, always far from his native land, amid all kinds of peoples and full of different impressions, he had constantly been preoccupied with his studies and never succeeded in arriving at a logical and satisfactory explanation of his origins. He did not know with certainty under what circumstances he had come into the world. Nor did he know whom to thank for the comfortable life and wealth he possessed…. His mother, however—who might she be? Perhaps some lady who was dishonored and afraid to reveal her shame! Was she a good person? Was she virtuous? After these and other divagations into his past, Raimundo, although still quite young, set about thinking. The mysterious veils of his childhood were already casting shadows onto his heart with a vacant and obscure sadness, in a bewilderment filled with sorrow.] (74-5) In this passage the question of memory is significant. Central to Raimundo’s understanding of himself, Brazil and the negotiation of his national identity abide in the recesses of his trauma. In Raimundo’s quest, we see that memory is inextricably tied to the body, to remember in fact is to re-member, configure one’s materiality in relation to time, space and experience. One’s memory is inherently tied to a larger collective memory—a relationship, affiliation or disaffiliation with other bodies. Raimundo’s journey or narrative of re-membrance is symbolic of the history of which black bodies throughout the African Diaspora was deprived. Slavery destroyed families, perverted kinship and erased familial bonds. Azevedo shows how this ignorance of one’s history permanently disavows the black body within the realms of the political. This relationship not only frames his relationship to his own body, but his relation to the nation.

95

The phantasmagorical quality of body and historicized memory can be further evidenced in the following scene in which the disjuncture between his lack of knowledge of his past articulates and conditions his social relations. Raimundo’s social relations are framed by the illegitimacy of his birth, and the body of his mother: Mulato! Esta só palavra explicava-lhe agora todos os mesquinhos escrúpulos, que a sociedade do Maranhão usara para com ele. Explicava tudo: a frieza de certas famílias a quem visitara; a conversa cortada no momento em que Raimundo se aproximava; as reticências dos que lhe falavam sobre os seus antepassados; a reserva e a cautela dos que, em sua presença, discutiam questões de raça e de sangue; a razão pela qual D. Amância lhe oferecera um espelho e lhe dissera: “Ora mire-se!” a razão pela qual, diante dele, chamavam de meninos aos moleques da rua. Aquela simples palavra dava-lhe tudo o que ele até aí desejara e negava-lhe tudo ao mesmo tempo, aquela palavra maldita dissolvia as suas dúvidas, justificava o seu passado; mas retirava-lhe a esperança de ser feliz, arrancava-lhe a pátria e a futura família; aquela palavra dizia-lhe brutalmente: “Aqui, desgraçado, nesta miserável terra em que nasceste, só poderás amar uma negra da tua laia! Tua mãe, lembra-te bem, foi escrava! E tu também o foste!” Mas, posto lhe repetissem com insistência que o Maranhão era uma província muito hospitaleira, como é de fato, reparava despeitado, que, sempre e por toda a parte, o recebiam constrangidos. Não lhe chegava as mãos um só convite para baile ou para simples sarau; cortavam muita vez a conversação, quando ele se aproximava; tinham escrúpulo em falar na sua presença de assuntos, aliás, inocentes e comuns; enfim — isolavam-no.(111116) [That single word now explained all the petty suspicion with which the society of Marnahão had treated him. It explained everything: the coolness of certain families he had visited; the conversations abruptly cut off the moment he approached; the reticence of those who spoke to him about his forbears; the reserve and caution of those who spoke to him, who, in his presence, discussed questions of race and blood; the reason Dona Amância had offered him the looking glass and said “Just look at yourself!” and the explanation for why they avoided calling the street urchins “black boy” when he was present That simple word revealed all he has desired to know until then, and at the same time denied him everything; that cursed word swept away his doubts and cleared up his past, but also robbed him any hope for happiness and wrenched from him his homeland and future family. That word told him brutally: “Here, you wretch, in this miserable land where you were born, you shall only love a Negress of your own sort! Your mother, remember it well, was a slave! And so were you!” But, although everyone insistently repeated to him that Maranhão was a very hospitable province, as it in fact is, he noticed resentfully that everywhere and always he was received with awkwardness. Not a single invitation for a dance or a simple soiree reached his hands. Conversations would often cease when he approached; people were hesitant to speak in his 96

presence about matters that were innocent and common. In short, they isolated him…] (205-207)

Azevedo’s novel may be dialoguing with José de Alencar’s enormously popular 1871 drama Mãe, which equally provides a mordent critique of Brazilian race relations. The main character, to pass as white, is also secreted the identity of his mother. His mother, who paradoxically masquerades as his servant to stay near him, leads him to believe that his mother is white. Jorge, a nascent doctor and man of reputable social standing, upon the revelation of the true identity of his mother, like Raimundo, suffers a social death and ultimately provokes his mother’s suicide. In both instances Azevedo and Alencar show that race is clearly articulated matrilinealy; the fate of the racialized subject is always in direct dialectic with the body of the mother. In the American case, Hazel V. Carby posits that the law that a slave followed the condition of his or her mother "necessitated the raising of protective barriers, ideological and institutional, around the form of the white mother whose progeny were heirs to the economic, social, and political interests in the maintenance of the slave system”(Carby 31).128 As segregation did not formally exist in Brazil as it did in the United States and the racial category of mulatto was positioned as a compass between blackness and whiteness, that is, as testament of harmonious race relations, Azevedo’s narrative purposefully explodes that racial category, exposing the essentialism of racial prejudice and bloodlines. Here Alencar and Azevedo not only repudiate the widely espoused notion of social whitening through education or financial gain, but show race in pre and post emancipation Brazil as a redoubtable barrier to black bodies’ belonging to the nation.

128

129

Ultimately, they show that

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 129 See Skimore’s Black into White.

97

the only way for mixed race bodies to “overcome” race is to expunge its lineage—dispose of the body of the black female subject. The Danger of White Female Desire The danger of female desire has persisted as a hallmark in western culture and society; however, under the regime of racialized slavery, the policing of white female desire proved critical and was undertaken with unprecedented violence. As we have seen, white women as symbols of purity and nation not only played an essential role in the maintenance of white patriarchal family, but in the reproduction of whiteness. In this sense we might conceive of the white female body (as the black female body) as political/ national bodies—bodies that exist in the propagation of power and national imago. Their bodies and more precisely their reproductive capabilities served in the concretization of white supremacy. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman maintain that white female sexual purity became the symbol used to consolidate (a distinctly white) American identity in the late nineteenth century, when the specter of hordes of black free persons threatened the old social order as it attempted to right itself again after dislocations of civil war (D’Emilio and Freedman 208-14).130 As a sexual imperative based on proper sexual object choice, heteronormativity outlawed interracial sexuality between white women and black men, and it assigned white women the responsibility of reproducing in monogamous marriages white heirs or more white masters. In Brazil and the United States it was also believed that white women were also supposedly endowed with dangerously strong sexual desire. However, as they were white women their desires required control, if not by her own volition, then by her father, husband or community. 130

D’Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd.ed Chicago. University of Chicago Press.1997.

98

Brazil and the United States were exceedingly cognizant of the sexual as a political device—a terrain of political articulation. For the white male supremacist, it became crucial to limit white women and black men in their sexual choices—hence the considerable juridical and social artifice constructed to engender fears of the predatory black male rapist and to avert and penalize interracial unions. Both nations were obsessed with the signifying quality of the sex and subsequently what it could potentially render in the wake and aftermath of abolition. As such the possession of white female desire and more expressly, white female sexual desire remained requisite to white establishment. As within her body resided the imagined image and myth of the nation, interracial sex as a possible “political right,” presented a serious threat in the corrosion of this image. This image or construction of the Brazilian woman as national embodiment resides in what I would refer to as antithetical nation building. As I have suggested, at this critical juncture of (be) coming, a nation must define what it is; however, it must also determine what it is not. The creation of these is and is not is in constant dialectic and mutually informing—they thus stabilize and crystallize one another. The definition or ideal must remain untouched, thus the inherent violence in the maintenance and perpetuation of such constructs. But on a basic level, it must be understood that individual desire always presents itself as an impediment to institutional or collective identity. As desire itself cannot be concretely defined and is indelibly (in)dividual in nature , its uncertainty, ambivalence, indiscernibility, can wreak havoc upon the construction of a collective political self .131 Breaking with romantic ideals and aesthetic, Azevedo renders a capacious and carnal view of female desire, focusing expressly on its physicality. This is evidenced in Ana Rosa’s initial contemplation of Raimundo:

131

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art.

99

Entontecia de pensar nele. O hibridismo daquela figura, em que a distinção e a fidalguia do porte harmonizavam caprichosamente com a rude e orgulhosa franqueza de um selvagem, produzia-lhe na razão o efeito de um vinho forte, mas de uma doçura irresistível e traidora; ficava estonteada; perturbava-se toda com a lembrança do contraste daquela fisionomia, 104 com a expressão contraditória daqueles olhos, suplicantes e dominadores a um tempo. E queria fazer-lhe todas as vontades, todos os caprichos – tornar-se passiva, servi-lo como uma escrava amorosa, dócil, fraca, que confessa sua fraqueza, seus medos, sua covardia, satisfeita de achar-se inferior ao seu homem, feliz por não poder dispensá-lo. E cismava, muito, muito, no marido, e esse marido aparecia-lhe na imaginação sob a esbelta figura de Raimundo.(49) [It dizzied her to think of him. The hybrid figure that he cut, in which the urbanity and nobility of his bearing mingles capriciously with the rough and haughty frankness of a savage, produced in her mind the effect of a potent wine, but an irresistible and treacherous sweetness. She was bewildered and totally vexed by the memory and the contrast between his countenance contradictory expression of those eyes, entreating and dominating at the same time. And she wanted to satisfy all of his whims and fancies, to become passive, to serve him like a loving, docile, and submissive slave who confesses her weaknesses, fears and cowardice, happy to discover her inferiority to her man, and delighted at unable to do without him. And she brooded at length about her husband, and this husband appeared to her imagination as the slender figure of Raimundo.] (103) This scene vacillates between dream /fantasy and reality. The (real)ity of this scene is achieved through the articulation of her lust for Raimundo. Here she makes clear reference to her sexual desire wanting to “satisfy all of his whims,” likening herself to a slave. Yearning to be possessed and dominated by him, she longs to become passive and more expressly for this physical longing to be reciprocated. Because of its physicality, Ana Rosa’s desire proves pernicious in the face of white patriarchal order. Curiously, in the United States, according to Martha Hodes, relationships between white women and black men were treated with relative tolerance until the abolition of slavery. With the black bodies no longer under the direct subjugation of white men, extreme and heinous acts of violence ensued:

100

Black freedom brought shift away from uneasy white toleration for sex between black men and white women, and a move toward increasingly violent intolerance. In the antebellum South , the dividing line of black slavery and white freedom has sufficiently if imperfectly sustained racial hierarchy, but with the demise of slavery, the maintenance of this hierarchy through other means became essential to white Southerners. Thus did the “mixture” of European and African ancestry come to be a much more serious taboo than ever before. Whereas in the antebellum South racial hierarchy had rested on the categories of “black” and “ white” as well as on the categories of slavery and freedom, now categories of color bore the entire burden of upholding the racial hierarchy. The new freedoms claimed by black men and women were extremely troubling to whites, but it was the newfound autonomy of the men among the former slaves that carried the gravest danger, especially in the eyes of white patriarchs. Because it was the men of the free black population who now gained formal political power and began to achieve economic independence, it was they who had enormous potential to destroy the South’s racial caste system. Intertwining these unfamiliar dangers –the possibility of blurring the categories of “black” and “white in a world without racial slavery, and the alarm of diminishing white supremacy—white people fastened on the taboo of sex between black men and white women with newfound urgency. More concretely, the vanquished white patriarchs of the Old South feared the loss of control over sex between blacks and whites. Under slavery, that control had permitted unchecked sex between white men and black women. Indeed, Southern patriarchs would soon devise a rationale by which they could retain their power and sexual exploitation over black women while claiming that sex between black men and white women would destroy the white race. After emancipation, expressions of white anxiety about sex between black men and white women reached an unprecedented intensity. (Hodes 147) As Hodes noted, the black male body proved to be particularly important to police, as the institution of slavery placed black men and mixed race men under the direct subjugation of white male authority. Emancipation, and the eventual political rights or agency that would be bequeathed, proved to be a salient obsession for white men in Brazil and the United States. Included in these newfound political rights, would perhaps be “access” to the once forbidden white female body. O Mulato, seems to align itself with Hodes’ observations, as Azevedo shows that Raimundo’s quest to desegregate desire, locates him as a clear threat to be removed by the force of arm. The eventual disposal of Raimundo’s body, and the black male body throughout the Americas, was essential to the fortification and perpetuation of white male authority and

101

dominance. What is indispensible to note here, is that there exists a clear nexus between political rights and the act of sex; however, race serves as the intermediary through which both are articulated. In other words, as the subjugation of black bodies had inherent ties to the sexual, the undoing of this authority, or right in the realms of the political, the repercussions would too indelibly be sexual in nature. This equation aides in the understanding that sex was not only a means to physically subjugate and dominate the flesh, but was always a metaphor, a political signifier of autonomy and authority. As such, in the policing and the forbidding of such liaisons, brutal violence resulted in the forms of lynching, murder, castration and public torture. These pornographic forms of torture and disposal further elucidate the thesis that the sexual is always a space of negotiation of position and display of power. These supposed crimes of desire (real or imagined) against white flesh were befittingly punished by the physical-metaphorical disavowal or castration of that sexual desire. What is interesting to note in Azevedo’s depiction of white female desire is that he purposefully escapes period racist ideologies of black male sexual aberrancy, or the conflation of black men and rapist of white women. Scholars such as Winthrop Jordan, George Frederickson, Angela Davis, and Robyn Wiegman have noted that the promulgation of the myth of the black male rapist is rooted in slavery as a phantasmal projection of the white male/master rapist. Jordan writes that “the image of the sexually aggressive Negro was rooted ... firmly in deep strata of irrationality. For it is apparent that white men projected their own desires onto Negroes: their own passion for Negro women was not fully acceptable to society or the self and hence not readily admissible. Sexual desires could be effectively denied and the accompanying anxiety and guilt in some measure assuaged, however, by imputing them to others. It is not we, but others, 102

who are guilty. It is not we who lust, but they”(Jordan 151-152).132 Jordan goes on to describe the methods by which black men accused of raping white women were punished: with castration and/or execution. The criminality of sexual violence was conflated with interracial sex, as both were considered debased and inappropriate expressions of sexual desire. The castration of black men for rape and for desiring non-black women was an egregious and extreme result of white men's projecting their interracial desires and sexual violence onto subjugated slaves (Jordan 155).133 While Urbano Duarte and Artur Azevedo leave the question of provocation to ambiguity, Azevedo does not leave such detail open to interpretation, and presents the white women of this novel as conscious sexual agents acting upon and physically realizing their desire. Ana Rosa not only initially expresses interest and desire for Raimundo, but pursues him romantically and initiates the sexual liaison between them—consequently leading to the conception of child. In the United States, writing by abolitionists documenting real and fictitious accounts of interracial sex depicted white women in a similar light as Hodes observes: Wartime testimony describing sex between black men and white women, while abolitionists thus reversed both gender and racial stereotypes by painting the white women as aggressive and the black men as reluctant. Although white men of the planter classes ruled in the slave South, white women of slaveholding families also commanded power over slaves, both female and male, as well as over free blacks. While those white women may have suffered from and lamented the abuses of the patriarchs who ruled over their household, they generally did not challenge that authority. White men of the slaveholding and nonslaveholding yeomanry, and even those of the lowest social ranks of Southern society, also shared a measure of this power by virtue of their membership in the racial category “white.” White women outside the planter classes could likewise draw upon that power, if not always successfully. Where a white woman, whether rich or poor, threatened to cry rape (or tried to threaten, or experimented with threatening), the black man must have responded with some combination of disdain, anger, and fear. In such scenarios, it is 132

Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1968. 133 Ibid.

103

not difficult to see how the two parties could later arrive at different accounts of sex that may have ensued. The very institution of racial slavery recast and distorted traditional Southern gender hierarchies by allowing some women (white and free) power over some men (black and especially enslaved). It is revealing that stories about coercion were often set on record by abolitionists…The details of such stories may have been enhanced for the sake of antislavery propaganda, yet abolitionists may also have been among the few to describe the reality of the coercion of black men for the public record. Never before the Civil War had the words of black men on the subject of sex with white women been set down in so sustained a manner. Although there is no way to know how common or uncommon were scenarios such as those the black men described to white Northerners, their voices as recorded during the war years uncover a consequence of Southern slave society that lurked as a possibility regardless of how frequently it came to pass (Hodes 147) Hodes’ observations of black male ambivalence and white female sexual coercion are present in O Mulato, as in the sexual encounter between Raimundo and Ana Rosa, Raimundo’s initial reluctance is apparent:

Ana Rosa correu à janela, assustada, palpitante. O carro parou à porta de Manuel; a moça estremeceu de medo e de esperança, e, toda excitada, convulsa, doida, viu saltar Raimundo. E Ana Rosa puxou-o violentamente. O rapaz deixou-se arrastar; supunha encontrar-se com Manuel. Ana Rosa correu à porta, fechou-a bruscamente, e atirou-se ao pescoço de Raimundo.“ Não partirás, ouviste? Não hás de partir!” Mas supões que eu seria capaz porventura de sacrificar-te ao meu amor? que eu seria capaz de condenar-te ao ódio de teu pai, ao desprezo dos teus amigos e aos comentários ridículos desta província estúpida?... Não! deixa-me ir, Ana Rosa! É muito melhor que eu vá!... E tu, minha estrela querida, fica, fica tranqüila ao lado de tua família; segue o teu caminho honesto; és virtuosa, serás a casta mulher de um branco que te mereça... Não penses mais em mim. Adeus. E Raimundo procurava arrancar-se das mãos de Ana Rosa. Ela prendeu-se-lhe ao pescoço, e, com a cabeça derreada para trás, os cabelos soltos e dependurados... — Pois olha, se não quiseres fugir, farei acreditar a meu pai que és um infame! Tens medo, não é verdade?... pois bem, eu lhe direi tudo que me vier à cabeça!... chamarei sobre ti todo o ódio e toda a responsabilidade do meu amor! porque tu és um homem mau, Raimundo, e meu pai acreditará facilmente que abusaste da hospitalidade que ele te deu. És um miserável. Sai daqui.Raimundo preciptou-se contra a porta. Ana Rosa atirou-se-lhe de novo ao pescoço, soluçando.Ana Rosa caiu a meio, amparando-se numa das mãos, mas ergueu-se logo, tomando-lhe a passagem. E, com um gesto altivo, atravessou-se contra a porta, de braços abertos, sobranceira, nobre, os punhos cerrados. Estava lívida e desgrenhada; a boca contraía-se-lhe numa dolorosa expressão de sacrifício e desespero. Arfavam-lhe as narinas e o seu olhar fulgurava terrível e cheio de ameaça.

Raimundo conservou-se um instante imóvel e perplexo defronte daquela inesperada energia. Não sairás, porque eu não quero! disse ela com a voz estalada e surda. Não sairás daqui, do meu quarto, enquanto não estivermos de todo comprometidos!... Ana Rosa foi ter 104

com ele e passou-lhe meigamente o braço pelas costas. Era outra vez a mesquinha rola medrosa e comovida.Hei de esgotar até o último recurso para continuar a ser só tua, meu amigo! É com essa resolução que te prendo a meu lado!... Pode ser que isso te pareça mau e desonesto, mas juro-te que nunca defendi tanto o meu pudor e a minha virtude como neste momento!... Um novo assobio de bordo veio interrompê-lo. Não ouves, Ana Rosa?... O vapor está chamando...Deixa-o ir, meu bem! tu ficas... E os dois estreitaram-se, fechados nos braços um do outro, unidos os lábios em mudo e nupcial delírio de um premiero amor.(143-145) [Come, come in here! Come, I must talk with you!” Ana Rosa dragged him forcefully. Raimundo allowed himself to be dragged supposing he would encounter Manuel. Ana Rosa ran to the door, shut it abruptly, and threw herself on Raimundo’s neck. And you, my beloved guiding light, stay, stay peacefully at your family’s side; follow your honest path; you’re virtuous, you will be the wife of a white man who’ll deserve you…Don’t think about me any longer. Farewell.”And Raimundo attempted to tear away from Ana Rosa’s hands. But she, clinging to his neck, with her head bent back, her hair loose and hanging down…” Take me wherever you want! Do with me whatever you think is best!” And she let her face fall to his chest and embraced him warmly. Raimundo, fearful of succumbing, stood still, dragged into a profound turmoil. “Well then, if you don’t want to flee, I’ll make my father believe you’re a vile creature! You’re afraid, aren’t you? Well, I’ll tell him anything that comes to mind. I’ll call down on you all the hatred and all the responsibility for my love! Because you’re an evil man, Raimundo, and my father will easily believe that you abused the hospitality he offered you. Raimundo rushed to the door. Ana Rosa threw herself at his neck, sobbing... Ana Rosa half fell down, supporting herself on one hand, but got up immediately, blocking his way. And with a haughty gesture, she placed herself against the door, her arms spread, disdainful, noble, her fists clenched. She was livid and disheveled; her mouth contracted in a painful expression of sacrifice and despair. Her nostrils were dilated and her eyes flashed terribly, full of menace. Raimundo remained still for an instant, perplexed at confronting that unexpected energy. “You shall not leave, because I don’t want you to, she said, her voice curt and muffled. “ You’ll not leave my room as long as we are not fully committed to one another.”…I shall exhaust every possible measure to continue to belong to you alone, my friend! It’s with this intention that I keep you here at my side… “Do you hear, Ana Rosa? The steamer is calling.” “Let it go, my love! You will remain...” And the two held each other even more tightly, clasped in one another’s arms, their lips united in the silent and nuptial bliss of a first love.] (153-157) The revelation of Raimundo’s racial identity serves in the construction of his body as forbidden fruit and further intensifies Ana Rosa’s love and sexual desire. What I would like to draw attention to, however, are the means through which this act of defiance is achieved. Ana Rosa uses the threat of rape to achieve her desire. This threat of violation further instantiates my claim that white female purity, or the idea of white female purity and sanctity were indeed a 105

political statute and punishable offense. Ana Rosa’s threat to cry rape is explicitly racialized. Hodes has noted that the ideology of white female virtue and the violence that protected it bestowed particular power and agency upon white women within American slave society. Rape or the violation of the flesh as a racialized punishable statute inextricably equated womanhood with whiteness. This ideological construct of white female virtue depended on the concomitant objectification and notion of the unrapability of black women.134 David Halperin proposes that the rac(ial)ist roots of sexual definitions must be uncovered: "When the sexual racism underlying such inquiries is more plainly exposed, their rationale will suffer proportionately" (50).135 Halperin argues that sexual ideologies function, like racial theories, to classify individuals for the purpose of organizing the social sphere. He also reveals that sexuality determines many beliefs about different races. At the turn into the twentieth century, beliefs about the deviant and excessive sexuality of black people led to myths of the black male rapist, to Jim Crow legislation, and to lynching as the punishment for black men who supposedly raped white women. At the culmination of the story, Raimundo is accordingly ‘punished’ for having committed the high crime of seizing white female flesh. Though Ana Rosa does in fact love Raimundo, it must be noted that the means by which she makes claims to the realization of her sexual desire and pleasure are indelibly tied to her knowledge of the discourse of white womanhood; her use thereafter delineates Raimundo’s “newly racialized” body as an extension

134

Black feminist scholar and activist Angela Y. Davis in Women, Race & Class (1983) notes that: “it would be a mistake to regard the institutionalized pattern of rape during slavery as an expression of white men’s sexual urges…Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose cover goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process to demoralize their men.”(241-245) 135 Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990.

106

of her racial position. Ultimately, in both cases the meaning of the physical intimacy between them serves as infallible signifiers of power, influence and individual desire. Racial Outing In the nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction throughout the Americas, the narrative device of what I would call “racial outing” as a consequence of passing, was particularly employed to intensify the dramatic quality of race narratives. But I would also suggest that this “outing” possessed a larger purpose than its spectacularity. Rather, these racial revelations staged critical interrogations/ interventions about “reading the body” and the arbitrariness of “cultural seeing by skin color” by critically examining the body’s negotiation of the color line. In the following Raimundo discovers the true reason why he has been denied Ana Rosa’s hand in marriage: Recusei-lhe a mão de minha filha, porque o senhor é... é filho de uma escrava...Eu?! O senhor é um homem de cor!... Infelizmente esta é a verdade...Raimundo tornou-se lívido. Manuel prosseguiu, no fim de um silêncio: Já vê o amigo que não é por mim que lhe recusei Ana Rosa mas é por tudo! A família de minha mulher sempre foi muito escrupulosa a esse respeito, e como ela é toda a sociedade do Maranhão! Concordo que seja uma asneira; concordo que seja um prejuízo tolo! o senhor porém não imagina o que é por cá a prevenção contra os mulatos!... Nunca me perdoariam um tal casamento; além do que, para realizá-lo, teria que quebrar a promessa que fiz a minha sogra, de não dar a neta senão a um branco de lei, português ou descendente direto de portugueses!... O senhor é um moço muito digno, muito merecedor de consideração, mas... foi forro à pia, e aqui ninguém o ignora. (116) [I denied you my daughter’s hand because you are...you are the son of a slave woman.” “I!” “You’re a colored man!...And that, unfortunately, is the truth.”Raimundo turned livid. Manuel, after a short silence, continued: “You surely see, my friend, that it’s not for my own sake I denied you Ana Rosa’s hand but for all these other reasons. My wife’s family was always quite scrupulous in that regard, and all of Maranhão is like them. I agree it’s a gross stupidity, I agree it’s a silly bias. You can’t imagine how deep the prejudice against mulattoes is around here! They’d never forgive me for such a marriage; besides, in order to carry it out, I’d have to break the promise I made to my mother-in-law not to give her granddaughter to anyone other than a proper white ma, either Portuguese or the direct descendent of Portuguese. You’re a very worthy young man and quite deserving of esteem, but you were freed at your baptism, and everyone here is aware of it.] (123) 107

Here outing serves as a means of establishing “bodily place” in disjuncture— a stabilization of position and racial hierarchy. Raimundo learns that he cannot marry Ana Rosa because he is the “son of a slave woman.” His negation of the white female body is denied by virtue of his approximation to the black female abject. Interestingly, Manuel’s revelation of Raimundo’s blackness concomitantly reveals the “conditionality” and limitations of his freedom. This lack of freedom as a birthright therefore dictates his disavowal that, as he describes, is irrevocably etched in the memory of the societal. It must also be taken into consideration that this outing occurs not just in the face of interracial sexual intimacy, but more precisely, in the face of the institution of marriage. Marriage, as a legitimate social institution would remove the usual fornicative appellation attributed to such relationships. As we have seen in chapter one, the family is indeed metonymical for the imagined vision of the nation—for to infiltrate the family, is to render alterable the image and projection of the national self. As such, to “other” the face of the family is to signify an impending reconfiguration of the political. Racial outing, then, is not merely a disclosure, but an avowal of raced power and foreclosure of the revealed subject. If we place the trope of passing within the incipient naturalist framework, it can be discerned that this investment in race, and more precisely the knowledge entrenched in these somatic categories, is a means by which man attempts to ‘control’ nature—to assert supremacy over it. It is in the negation of Ana Rosa’s hand in marriage that the reader bears witness to the primary evolution of Raimundo’s feelings toward Ana Rosa. After Manuel’s refusal as he states: “desejava-o muito mais depois da resistência oposta ao seu pedido; a recusa de Manuel vinha

108

dar-lhe a medida do verdadeiro apreço em que tinha Ana Rosa. Até ali julgava que aquele casamento dependia dele somente, e preparava-se frio, sem entusiasmo, quase fazendo sacrifício; e agora, depois do insucesso do seu pedido, eis que o desejava com ardor. (122) [He wanted it much more after the resistance that his request had encountered. Manuel’s refusal provided him with a measure of the true esteem in which he held Ana Rosa. Until then he had supposed that their marriage depended on him alone, and he had readied himself coldly, without enthusiasm, almost as I making a sacrifice. And now, after his unsuccessful request, now, he desired it passionately.] (129) In this repudiation Raimundo configures the symbolic quality of Ana Rosa to his life. The symbolism however is duplicitous much like Raimundo’s outing. It is in the emergence of this symbolic order that Ana Rosa (be) comes white and that Raimundo (be) comes black. Race, adroitly positions itself as filter of desire. It is through his negotiation of these preexisting narratives or texts (black manhood/ slavery vs. white womanhood) that he bears witness to both their inherent violence and limitations. As his outing also summoned yet another physical displacement, his desire for her is also articulated through and associated to domestic space, a home (the nation). His longing to inhabit domestic space, to possess a home is directly connected to his desire to belong: E, de tudo isso, vinha-lhe um grande mal-estar. Depois da negativa de Manuel, Ana Rosa afigurava-se-lhe uma felicidade indispensável; já não podia compreender a existência, sem a doce companhia daquela mulher simples e bonita, que, no seu desejo estimulado, lhe aparecia agora sob mil novas formas de sedução. E, na sua fantasia enamorada, acariciava ainda a idéia de possuí-la, idéia que, só então o notava, dormira todas as noites com ele, e que agora, ingrata, queria escapar-lhe com as desculpas banais e comuns de uma amante enfastiada. Oh! sim! desejava Ana Rosa! habituara-se imperceptivelmente a julgá-la sua; ligara-a a pouco e pouco, sem dar por isso, a todas as aspirações da sua vida; sonhara-se junto dela, na intimidade feliz do lar, vendo-a governar uma casa que era de ambos, e que Ana Rosa povoava com alegria de um amor honesto e fecundo. E agora, desgraçado olhava para toda essa felicidade, como o criminoso olha, através às grades do cárcere para os venturosos casais, que se vão lá pela nua, de braço dado, rindo e conversando ao lado dos filhos. E Raimundo antejulgava perfeitamente que aquele empenho de Manuel em 109

negar-lhe a filha, longe de arredá-la do seu amor, mais e mais o empurrava para ela, ligando-a para sempre ao seu destino. (130) [And, from all of this, a great uneasiness afflicted him. After Manuel’s denial, Ana Rosa seemed to him indispensable for his happiness; he could no longer envision any existence without the sweet company of that uncomplicated and lovely young woman who, to his aroused desire, now appeared to him a thousand times more seductive. And in his enamored fantasy he still nurtured the idea of possessing her, an idea that, as he only now realized, had slumbered with him every night, but now, like an ingrate, wanted to slip away from him with the banal and commonplace excuses of a weary lover. Oh, yes, he desired Ana Rosa! Imperceptibly he had grown accustomed to regarding her as his; little by little and without perceiving it, he had been linking her to all the aspirations of his life. He had dreamed of himself at her side in the happy intimacy of a home, watching her manage a house that belonged to them both, and that Ana Rosa would fill with the happiness of an honest and fruitful love. And now, wretched, he looked on all that happiness like the criminal who stares through the prison bars at the fortunate married couples parading down the street arm in arm, laughing and conversing, with their children at their side. And Raimundo perceived perfectly that Manuel’s zeal in denying him his daughter, far from separating him from his love, was pushing him more and more toward her, linking her forever to his destiny.] (165) In this passage Raimundo makes clear reference to a home that belongs to them both—a construction of legitimate domestic space. Raimundo’s racial displacement also serves as a means through which he is forced to come to terms with the legacy of his physical displacement. He clearly links his lot, like his racial position, to physical and social place—a prison that places him inextricably outside the possibility of belonging. This impossibility is articulated by the distance with which he stands from the house proper. This scene is particularly salient as it is here the protagonist makes clear claims at Ana Rosa’s body as a national signifier, paradoxically that which signifies his entry and the barrier that blocks it. Politicization of the Body As the novel develops Azevedo utilizes Raimundo’s dispossession and desire to articulate what he envisages as the inherent perversity of the slave regime. Raimundo’s segregated desire becomes politicized and is employed to stage a vehement indictment of the institution of slavery.

110

This politicization is corporeal, as he positions Raimundo’s body vis-à-vis the national, historical and political narrative: “E tudo, por quê?... pensava ele, porque sucedera sua mãe não ser branca!... Mas do que servira então ter-se instruído e educado com tanto esmero? do que servira a sua conduta reta e a inteireza do seu caráter?... Para que se conservou imaculado?... para que diabo tivera ele a pretensão de fazer de si um homem útil e sincero?...” E Raimundo revoltava-se. “Pois, melhores que fossem as suas intenções todos ali o evitavam, porque a sua pobre mãe era preta e fora escrava? Mas que culpa tinha ele em não ser branco e não ter nascido livre?.. Não lhe permitiam casar com uma branca? De acordo! Vá que tivessem razão! mas por que insultá-lo e persegui-lo? Ah! amaldiçoada fosse aquela maldita raça de contrabandistas que introduziu o africano no Brasil! Maldita! mil vezes maldita! Com ele quantos desgraçados não sofriam o mesmo desespero e a mesma humilhação sem remédio? E quantos outros não gemiam no tronco, debaixo do relho? E lembrar-se que ainda havia surras e assassínios irresponsáveis tanto nas fazendas como nas capitais!... Lembrar-se de que ainda nasciam cativos, porque muitos fazendeiros, apalavrados com o vigário da freguesia, batizavam ingênuos como nascidos antes da lei do ventre livre!... Lembrar-se que a conseqüência de tanta perversidade seria uma geração de infelizes, que teriam de passar por aquele inferno em que ele agora se debatia vencido! E ainda o governo tinha escrúpulo de acabar por uma vez com a escravatura; ainda dizia descaradamente que o negro era uma propriedade, como se o roubo, por ser comprado e revendido, em primeira mão ou em segunda, ou em milésima, deixasse por isso de ser um roubo para ser uma propriedade!(130) [And all of this, for what reason?” he mulled. “Just because it happens that my mother was not white…What good is it for me to have so diligently pursued an education? What good are my exemplary conduct and moral integrity?...Why have I kept myself undefiled? Why the devil have I aspired to become a useful and honest man?” And Raimundo grew disgusted. “For, no matter how high my ideals, everyone here has avoided me, simply because my wretched mother was black and had been a slave. But, what fault is it of mine for not being white and not being born free?...They won’t allow me to marry a white girl ? Fine! Perhaps they’re right! But why insult and persecute me? Oh, a curse on that damned race of smugglers who brought the African to Brazil! Damned a thousand times damned! How many unfortunates, besides myself, have suffered the same rage of hopeless humiliation? How many others have shrieked in the stocks, under the lash? And to think that there are still beatings and unpunished murders on ranches as well as in the cities! To think that some are still born in captivity, because many landowners in conspiracy with the parish priest are baptizing the guileless as if they were born before the law of the free womb! To think that the consequence of such perversity will be a generation of misfits who’ll have to suffer the same inferno where I now struggle in defeat! And still the government has qualms about abolishing slavery once and for all; they still say without shame that Negroes are property, as if the theft of their freedom for purchase and resale, whether for the first, second, or thousandth time, legitimized their status as property and removed the stigma of outright thievery on the part of their masters!] (143)

111

This citation demonstrates Raimundo’s bourgeoning political and national consciousness. Disavowal serves as the impetus by which he reconfigures his material relation to the nation. Before, Raimundo regarded the suffering of the slave with the distance of an ambivalent voyeur. However, like Gustavo of O Escravocrata, it is in the pain of abnegation that Raimundo comes into consciousness and is forced to regard himself within the national and political discourse on race and slavery. By inserting himself vis-à-vis the slave, Raimundo clearly articulates that race is a complete disavowal of person, merit and deed— an insurmountable impasse for black bodies in pre and post abolition Brazil. Race positions him as misfit, thus repudiating all possibility of belonging or being afforded true participation in the nation. Raimundo denounces the perversion of murders and tortures that go unpunished, critically condemning the role of the Catholic Church and State as complicit bedfellows in the propagation of violent acts against black bodies, and their resistance to see them outside the statue of personal-legitimate property. In other words, Raimundo’s national identity or affiliation is inherently constructed in disavowal. His rapport with the nation is articulated by his non-place therein. By placing himself in relation and in disjuncture to Brazilian geography and history, he assesses the possibility of belonging. Sartre discusses the revelatory power of pain and the way in which ontological qualities of existence can be accessed in the matrix of trauma, by using the example of eye pain. Sartre remarks that pain in the eyes is really “the-eyes-as-pain.” Pain does not exist anywhere among the actual objects of the universe but is instead “simply the translucent matter of consciousness, its being-there.” And, “ the Pain exists beyond all attention and all knowledge since it slips into each act of attention and of knowledge, since it is this very act … Pain consciousness is an internal negation of the world; but at the same time it exists its pain—i.e., itself – as a wrenching away from the self. Pure pain as the simple ‘lived’ cannot be reached…But pain –consciouness is 112

a project toward a further consciousness which would be empty of all pain…This is the unique character of corporal existence—the inexpressible which one wishes to flee is rediscovered at the heart of this wrenching away;…it is… the being of the flight which wishes to flee it” (438).136 In this sense, pain is a consequence of consciousness, and when one is in pain, pain is the very substance of consciousness—so that what you are wrenching yourself away from is your own consciousness, a process that brings you back to the awareness of your self as consciousness. For pain is more than an affirmation or telling of the materiality of the body, rather its consciousness, its revelation abide in the significance of the body’s pain in relation to others.137 While Artur and Duarte’s play concentrates on the question of agency and the negotiation of power amongst the enslaved, Azevedo’s text creates a rupture by staging a similar inquiry exploring the ruses of what Kim D. Butler has called “limited” freedom in the emancipated slave body.

138

As freedom was a statue to be conferred by white, it must be understood that the definition of freedom and its exercise and limitations were inherently fettered to the desire, the power, and the identity of the giver. Since freedom is to be bestowed or earned, the parameters, limitations and the right to police those parameters lie within the confines of white desire.

136

Sartre, Jean-Paul; translated by Hazel E. Barnes Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge, 2003. For Darieck Scott, “we can see blackness in its abjection as a project, as a “translucent matter,” crafted by sociogenesis, which, as the negation of freedom and as the means and product of a process of alienation is or can be a project toward the experience of consciousness itself” (79). 138 For more information regarding the notion of “limited freedom” see Kim D. Butler’s Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post- Abolition, São Paulo and Salvador. 137

113

Death, Despoil and the Restoration of the White Family As stated earlier in this chapter, O Mulato reveals Azevedo’s great morosity regarding the fate of the black body and the Brazilian nation. The perverse legacy of torture, disposal and erasure is further evidenced in the novel’s cynical conclusion: O par festejado eram o Dias e Ana Rosa, casados havia quatro anos. Ele deixara crescer o bigode e aprumara-se todo; tinha até certo emproamento ricaço e um ar satisfeito e alinhado de quem espera por qualquer vapor o hábito da Rosa; a mulher engordara um pouco em demasia, mas ainda estava boa, bem torneada, com a pele limpa e a came esperta. Ia toda se saracoteando, muito preocupada em apanhar a cauda do seu vestido, e pensando, naturalmente, nos seus três filhinhos, que ficaram em casa a dormir Grand’chaine, double, serré! berravam nas salas. O Dias tomara o seu chapéu no corredor e, ao embarcar no carro, que esperava pelos dois lá embaixo, Ana Rosa levantara-lhe carinhosamente a gola da casaca.— Agasalha bem o pescoço, Lulu! Ainda ontem tossiste tanto à noite, queridinho!...(174-175) [This fêted couple was Dias and Ana Rosa, who had been married now for four years. He had let his moustaches grow and learned to stand up straight. He even has a rich man’s mien, as well as the satisfied and smug air of someone whose ships are about to come in. Ana Rosa had put on a little too much weight, but was still quite handsome and shapely, with clear skin and well-toned flesh. She went gliding out, quite worried about keeping the train of her dress from dragging and, naturally, thinking about her three little children asleep at home. “Grand’chaine, double, serré!” resounded through the rooms. Dias had received his hat in the hall, and, as they entered the carriage that was awaiting them, Ana Rosa affectionately turned up the collar of his coat. “Cover your neck, well, dearest! Last night you still had such a cough, my darling!”] (226) In this disquieting ending Azevedo reveals the once madly in love Ana Rosa willing to defy all odds, married in wedded bliss to the man she once regarded with utter disgust and disdain. What the perceptive reader will note in this scene is that throughout the novel the black body is pervasively evoked in conversation. In this flash forward, however, we witness its complete erasure from the narrative; not only is the memory of Raimundo not evoked, but the physical presence of black bodies—even slaves are absent from the text. Raimundo’s murder at the hands of Dias, instigated by Canon Diogo, like the torture of his mother Domingas, is embedded within the machinations of white supremacy, reducing him to 114

the very ambiguity of the racial statue that glosses the cover of the novel. His murder by gun, indeed a phallic symbol of power, serves as a means of dramatizing white male fraternity in an instance of homosocial bonding around the shared brutalization and symbolic murder of the black male body.139 Symbolically both Raimundo’s murder and Domingas’ torture are collective glories, collective pleasures, intrinsically fettered to the public perversions of the slave regime. For as Spillers adroitly notes: The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated,” and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism.(209) In essence, the fate of the black and miscegenated body is always determined by how it can be used as a device and the ways in which it fits or does not fit in the production of institutional power and pleasure, within discursive and physical boundaries—thus, rendering it disposable at will. The black body as institutional body is always and necessarily fettered to the limitations of discourse—whether to justify or disavow, the body is always positioned at the nexus of materiality and metaphor. Sartre notes, “the terrible thing about Death,’ said Malraux, ‘is that it transforms life into Destiny.’ By this we must understand that death reduces the for-itself-for-others to the state of simple for-others. Today I alone am responsible for the being of dead Pierre, I in my freedom.

139

For an elaborate treatise of white male homosocial bonding during the colonial era and beyond, see: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.

115

Those dead who have not been able to be saved and transported to the boundaries of the concrete past of a survivor are not past; they along with their pasts are annihilated” (165-66).140 One meaning of this observation that when a person dies, his survivors assume full power over him (by the means of whatever way they maintain the memory of him) is that only ending, only loss, renders meaning. For as Scott observes: “meaning becomes possible (not inevitable, perhaps)—or perhaps so as a result of the inescapable operations of living consciousness in loss” (240). By this non-evocation Azevedo charts a trajectory in which black subjectivity is both constructed and deconstructed through discourse. As the body is indeed a historical narrative and serves as haunting evidence, it is deliberately impaled to the production of purposeful silences in the construction of the national self. To murder and dispose of bodies is to render such bodies’ contradiction, dissent or counter narrative unspoken. This pornographic relationship, this legacy of torture and desire disavowed, forecloses the black body’s participation in the official (or hegemonic) imagining of the national narrative. Ultimately Azevedo concludes the novel with a charge. O Mulato forces the reader not only to bear witness to injustice, but places the consciousness of this injustice in the hands of its readers—forcing them to partake in, or denounce the status quo—ordained to rewrite or reprise national myth.

140

Sartre, Jean-Paul; translated by Hazel E. Barnes Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge, 2003.

116

Chapter Three Predatory Perversions: Same-Sex Desire, Prostitution and the Emancipation Body in Adolfo Caminha’s Bom Crioulo Sometimes I wonder about their desire,…Grandmama’s and Great Gram’s…You know how they talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the same camel?...Hate and desire both riding them . —Gayl Jones, Corregidora. What a life, what a life! A black slave on the plantation, a slave on board and a slave everywhere. And they called that serving the country . Adolfo Caminha, Bom Crioulo. The image of boy, sleek and curvaceous, fitted temptingly through his imagination, seducing him, transporting him to a world of delights, to an atmosphere of sensuality and lust, the mysterious silence of a life devoted to a secret love, the supreme pleasures of the flesh, and all the ecstasies of a passion now boarding on madness. All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. —Toni Morrison, Online NewsHour interview, Mar. 9, 1998.

In Search of Luiz da Costa In 1743 Luiz da Costa was transported from Brazil to stand trial for sodomy before the Tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon. Luiz, originally from the Costa da Mina, was brought to the northeast province of Pernambuco where he worked as a domestic slave (Gordon 271).141 In his confession, Luiz relates having accompanied his master on a hunting trip in the sertão, and it was during this occasion that the crime for which he was to stand trial betided him. In his testimony, Luiz accuses Manoel Alves Cabral of having sodomized him under threat of death. A priest, who was also in the hunting party, Manoel de Lima, though not having witnessed the act, found Luiz fleeing and heard his story. Lima proceeded to bring the case to the attention of the Inquisition. Richard Gordon suggests that Lima might have seen an investigation

141

Gordon, Richard A. Confessing Sodomy, Accusing a Master: The Lisbon Trial of Pernambuco’s Luiz da Costa. In Afro- Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Edited by Kathyrn Joy McKnight and Leo J. GaraFalo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009.

117

and trial preferable to the advances that continued after that first incident, especially given the likelihood that Luiz would be transported to Lisbon to stand trial (Gordon 270). Although some cases that fell under the Inquisition were tried in Brazil by bishops, the majority of the trials took place in the Tribunal of Lisbon. The Tribunal of Lisbon possessed jurisdiction over Brazil, the Atlantic islands, and Africa. Depending on the circumstances or the severity of a given offense, the Tribunal demanded that certain cases that transpired in the colonies be tried in Lisbon—a fate that befell Luiz and not his master. As Gordon points out, in Pernambuco during Lent, the behaviors prohibited by the Inquisition were publicized, and residents were required to denounce transgressions and confess their own, information that would presumably be communicated to the Portuguese Inquisition (Gordon 271). Historian Luiz Mott has contended that after New Christians, sodomites were the social group most persecuted by the Portuguese Inquisition (Mott 273).142 In1571 Dom Sebastião after having witnessed the unprecedented number of cases involving sodomy between men and women decreed the Lei Sobre o Pecado Nefando de Sodomia [Law of the Hateful Sin of Sodomy]: Vendo eu como de algum tempo a esta parte forma alguma pessoas de meus reinos senhorios culpados no pecado nefando, de que eu recebi grande sentimento pela graveza de pecado tão abdominável e de que meus reinos pela bondade de Deus tanto tempo estiveram limpos. (Mott 124) [Seeing that for some time in some way or another people of my kingdom have been accused of this hateful sin, of which I have received great word of the gravity of this

142

Mott, Luiz. O sexo prohibido: Virgins, gays e escravos nas garras da Inquisição. Campinas, Brazil: Pairus, 1988.

118

abominable sin and that my kingdom for the mercy of God was clean for such a long time.]143

In the same vein, Gilberto Freyre has noted that “it is known to be a fact that even Portuguese men of arms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, possibly by reason of their long maritime crossing and their contact with the voluptuous life of Oriental countries, had developed all forms of lust” (Freyre 200). 144 O Tribunal do Santo Ofício da Inquisição functioned in Portugal from 1536 to 1765, and was extinct in 1821. With respect to sodomy, close to five thousand instances were confessed or denounced. Of this total over thirty were burned at the stake (Gordon 394). The most vigorous prosecution against sodomites developed particularly in the XVII century and the last prisons were produced in 1711 in Coimbra. In the XVI century, of the first thirty imprisoned for sodomy, twelve were not Portuguese; the only ones sent to the stake were a few Turkish and the other mulattos (Figari 49). The Portuguese Inquisition prosecuted cases of sodomia perfeita or consumada, i.e., sodomy with phallic and anal penetration as well as ejaculation—but not what was referred to as molície—all other homoerotic acts. Luiz da Costa mentions both sodomia perfeita and molície in his confession (Gordon 272). As Gordon has adroitly pointed out, it was very common for cases of sodomy during the Inquisiton, and indeed beyond, to derive from the incongruent power relations between master and slaves. (Gordon 272). The stigma and criminalization of the act, however, befell the body of the slave.

143

Translation mine. Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves .Casa-Grande & Senzala: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. 2d English language, rev ed. New York: Knopf, 1968; 1956. 144

119

One year from the event passed and Luiz was taken into custody in Lisbon on July 23, 1743, tried on July 30, and sentenced on August 16. As Vainfas informs us, Inquisitors at the time sought testimony regarding whether or not sodomy was voluntary or forced, the age of the defendants, and the specific circumstances of the acts (Gordon 275). Taking into consideration the nature of Luiz’s offense the Inquisitors assigned Luiz a guardian (as he was under the age of twenty-five), warning him to never again, to commit or subject himself to such discreditable acts, or he would suffer the full burden of the law. What is curious to note in Luiz’s trial, is that neither his master received the blame for having raped him, nor was he required to be present during the trial proceedings. Luiz, for having confessed his rape to the parish priest and Portuguese Inquisition, was left to suffer both the physical and judicial burden of his master’s transgressions. His confession and reprimand read as follows: Confissão Aos 30 dias do mês de julho 1743 anos em Lisboa nos Estados e Casa Terceira das audiências da Santa Inquisição estando aí na [audiência da] manhã o Senhor Inquisidor Manoel Varejão Távora mandou vir perante si a um homem que nos vinte e três dias do presente mês e ano veio preso em custódia para os cárceres desta Inquisição...[e que pedira] audiência. E sendo presente [e] por [pedir para confessar suas culpas, lhe foi dado o juramento dos Santos Evangelhos, em que pôs a mão, sob cargo do que lhe foi mandado dizer verdade e ter segredo, o que tudo prometeu cumprir. E disse chamar-se Luiz da Costa, homem preto escravo de Manoel Alves Cabral, não sabem quem foram seus pais, natural da Costa da Mina, e morador na Vila da Boa Vista, Bispado de Pernambuco, de vinte anos de idade pouco mais ou menos. 145 E logo foi admoestado, que pois tomava tão bom conselho, como o de querer suas culpas, lhe convêm muito trazê-las todas à memória para delas fazer uma inteira e verdadeira confissão, não impondo porém a si, nema outrem, testemunho falso, porque só o dizer a 145

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Processo da Inquisição de Lisboa no.6, processo 45, microfilm call number M.F. 2592.

120

verdade é que lhe convém para descargo de sua consciência, salvação de sua alma, e bom despacho de sua casa. ...[Ao] que respondeu, que só a verdade havia de dizer. A qual era: Que haverá um ano mais ou menos, achando-se...na Aldeia de Bode, sertão de Pernambuco, com [o] dito seu senhor Manoel Alves Cabral, saíram num dia a caça pelo mato. E estando ambos sós o provocou o dito deu senhor para ter com ele atos de sodomia, valendo-se para esse feito de o ameaçar e intimidar com a espingarda que trazia dizendo-lhe [que o] havia de matar se não consentisse no que ele pretendia executar, E sem embargo de repugnância que ele fez, obrigado do medo consentiu na dita torpeza, tendo com...o dito seu senhor um ato de sodomia consumado, havendo seminação e penetração no vazo prepóstero,sendo...Luiz paciente, e [o] dito seu senhor agente. E que em outras ocasiões, em diversos lugares o provocara para a mesma torpeza, porém que nunca mais chegara a praticar com ele, por...[lhe] repugnar, e não querer consentir nela. E somente para se ver livre do dito seu senhor lhe consentia [que] praticasse com ele alguns pecados de molície que executou em repetidas ocasiões. E declara mais, que na ocasião acima dita, em que foi à caça com o dito senhor ia também na sua companhia um padre chamado Manoel de Lima, o qual não pôde ver com individuação o dito fato, e somente reparou em...[Luiz] andar fugindo dito seu senhor a roda de uma morada, por cuja cause lhe...perguntou depois o que aquilo era,..[Luiz] lhe declarou na forma que acima fica dito. Disse mais que... estando em casa do dito seu senhor com outro preto chamado José, tamb’em escravo do mesmo, e dormindo ambos em uma cama, veio por repitidas vezes o dito seu senhor ter com eles de noite em ocasião em que estavam dormindo, e metendo-se no meio deles. [Luiz] percebera... clara e distintamente práticas com o dito preto José, atos de sodomia cosumados, os quais o dito preto lhe declarou ao depois ser assim como ele entendia. E que estas são as culpas que tem que confessar nesta mesa, as quais cometera ...[por lhe] cosntranger e intimidar o dito senhor, na forma que acima tem declarado e deve haver cometido. Pede perdãoe que com ele se use de miséricordia e mais não disse... Foi-lhe dito que tomou muito conselho em principiar a confessar nesta Mesa as suas culpas, as quais deve trazer todas à memória para delas fazer uma inteira e verdadeira confissão. [Os Senhores Inquisidores lhe]...advertem e recomendam muito [que] se aparte e fuja totalmente da companhia de todas aquelas pessoas que o podem perverter e induzir, por qualquer modo...a tornar a cometer semelhantes culpas, porque não emendando será castigao com todo o rigor de direito. E por dizer que não tinha mais culpas que confessar, foi outra vez admoestado...e mandado ao seu cárcere, sendo-lhe primeiro lida esta sua confissão, que por ele ouvida e entendida em presença de seu curador disse que estava escrita na verdade e que nela se affirmava, ratificava e a tornava a dizer de novo sendo nesessário,e que nela juramento dos Santos Evangelhos que outra vez lhe foi dado. Foi visto na Mesa do Santo Ofício desta Inquisição de Lisboa o anuário de testemunhas, que a ela remeteu o [Bispado] Ordinário de Pernambuco, ao confitente Luiz da Costa, preto, escravo, solteiro, natural da Costa da Mina, morador da Vila da Boa Vista. Bispado de Pernambuco; e a confissão que o mesmo fez nesta Mesa. E pareceu a todos os votos que 121

vistas as circumstâncias...e sua confissão, [que] fosse o réu admoestado e repreendido nesta Mesa...[e que ] pague as culpas. Lisboa em Mesa 13 de agosto de 1743. [On the thirtieth day of July 1743, in Lisbon in the Third Office of Hearings of the Holy Inquisition, the inquisitor Manoel Varejão Távora, being there in the morning session, commanded that a man come before him who on the twenty-third day of the current month and year was received into the custody of the prison of the Inquisition…and who had requested a hearing. And being present …and having asked to confess his misdeeds, he was administered the oath of the Holy Gospels, on which he placed his hand, and under the authority of which he was commanded to tell the truth and to maintain secrecy, all of which he swore to fulfill. And he said that he was called Luiz da Costa, Black male slave of Manoel Alves Cabral; no one knows who his parents were; native of Costa da Mina and resident of Vila da Boa Vista, Diocese of Pernambuco; more or less twenty years of age. And then he was advised that, because he had decided to follow such good cousel as to desire to confess his misdeeds, it would very much behoove him to recall all of them so that he might form from them a whole and true confession, not imputing, however, to himself or to others false testimony, for only the telling of the truth is proper for clearing his conscience, saving his soul and satisfactorily resolving his case. …To which he responded that he would tell only the truth , which was that more or less a year ago, while he was in …in Aldeia de Bode, in the hinterlands of Pernambuco, with his master Manoel Alves Cabral, they went hunting in the woods. And when they were alone his master induced to commit acts of sodomy, threatening and intimidating him with the musket he had, saying that he would kill him if he did not consent to what he intended to effectuate. And in spite of the repugnance that he felt, obliged by fear he consented to the turpitude realizing with…his master a consummated act of sodomy, there being ejaculation and penetration in his posterior orifice,…performing Luiz the passive role and his master the active. And on many other occasions, and in diverse places [his master] had attempted to induce him into the same turpitude, though he had never managed to practice it with him,…due to Luiz’s repugnance and his disinclination to consent to it. And only to see himself free from his master harassment did he consent to practice with him other sinful sexual acts, which he made on repeated occasions. And he additionally declares that on the above-mentioned occasion in which he went hunting with his master there was also in the party a priest called Manoel de Lima, who did not witness the referred incident due to the fact that he was hunting deep in the woods, which prevented him from seeing for himself said fact, and observed only…that Luiz was fleeing from his master around a dwelling, because of which he…later asked Luiz what that was all about, and…Luiz related to him the facts in the manner in which they are articulated above. He also stated that…while in the house of his master with another black called José, also a slave of the same master, and while they were both sleeping in a bed, his master came repeatedly to be with them at night while they were sleeping, and got into the bed between them. Luiz clearly and distinctly perceived…deeds with said black José, acts of 122

consummated sodomy, which black said later declared to him to have been exactly what he had comprehended. And these are the misdeeds that he has to confess to this board, misdeeds that he had committed…because his master coerced him and intimidated him in the way in which he has declared above and must have committed. He asks for forgiveness and that he be shown mercy and said no more. He was told that he followed good counsel in initiating his confession of his misdeeds before this board, all of which he should recall so that he might form from them a whole and true confession. [The Inquisitors]…caution him and strongly recommended that he distance himself and flee the company of anyone who might pervert him and induce him in any way…to commit again similar misdeeds, because if he does not mend his ways he will be punished with the full force of the law. And because he said that he had no more misdeeds to confess, he was once again advised…and sent to his prison after he was read this, his confession, which he heard and understood in the presence of his guardians and said that it was written truly and that he affirmed it, ratified it, and that he would say the same thing over again if necessary, and that he had nothing to add, remove, change, or correct…under the authority of the same oath on the Holy Gospels, which he was again administered. The Board of the Holy Office of this Inquisition of Lisbon saw the directory of testimony, sent to it by the Diocese of Pernambuco, regarding the confessor Luiz da Costa, black, slave single, native of Costa da Mina, resident of Vila da Boa Vista, Diocese of Pernambuco; and the confession that said man made to this board. And it seemed to all of the members of the board that taking into consideration the circumstances…and the confession, Luiz da Costa should be advised and reprimanded by this board and that he should atone for his misdeeds. Lisbon, meeting of the board, on the thirteenth day of August 1743.]146 Termo de Repreensão/Register of Reprimand E sendo presente, e pelos ditos senhores asperamente repreendido, lhe foi dito que não torne a cometer, nem consentir nas culpas...[pelas quais] veio preso para os cárceres desta Inquisação, nem em outras semelhantes sob pena der gravamente castigado, e que por hora se pode ir para onde bem lhe estiver, o que tudo...[Luiz da Costa] prometeu cumprir na forma que se lhe ordenava sob cardo do juramento dos Santos Evangelhos que lhe foi dado...(279)147 [And being present and severely reprimanded by said inquisitors, he was told that he not commit again nor consent to these misdeeds...[for which] he was received into the custody of the prison of this Inquisition, nor other similar misdeeds under the pain of being gravely

146

All English translations of the trial proceedings are Richard A. Gordon’s from “Confessing Sodomy, Accusing a Master: The Lisbon Trial of Pernambuco’s Luiz da Costa.” in Afro- Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. 147 “Confessing Sodomy, Accusing a Master: The Lisbon Trial of Pernambuco’s Luiz da Costa.”

123

punished, and that for now he can go wherever he liked…[Luiz da Costa] swore to perform in the manner in which they ordered under the authority of an oath on the Holy Gospels.]

Though Luiz’s story is indeed a veritable account of male rape in the bourgeoning Brazilian slave empire, his story, however, is further complicated by the means in which it was recorded. Luiz’s story arrives to us as indirect discourse paraphrased in the third person—edited, contorted and manipulated at the hand and whim of the scribe. Luiz’s trial was presided over by the inquisitor Manoel Varejão Távora and recorded by a scribe, Manoel Alfonso Rebelo. As Gordon informs us, both the rigid structure of the trial and the relaying of all words and actions by the scribe influenced how Luiz was able to relate his story, and how it ultimately was recorded in the document. In the trials of the Portuguese Inquisition there was very little opportunity for the prisoner to speak. In almost every aspect of the trial, Luiz speaks no more than a few words (Gordon 269). We must then consider not only the possible silences and erasures in Luiz’s confession, but the questionable or presumed agency with which it was documented. As we see in the trial proceedings, Alves Cabral had attempted to sodomize Luiz several times, as he had done to another slave José—coming into their beds late at night to force them to engage in homoerotic acts. The most significant aspect of Luiz’s testimony is that it is one of the first denunciations/ documentation of interracial male rape under the bourgeoning Brazilian slave regime. Luiz does not only lay bare his own story of subjection, but also evokes the narrative of his fellow slave. From Luiz’s trial proceedings we begin to witness the incipient displacement and projection of deviance and same-sex desire on to the slave body. The slave, as evidenced in Luiz’s confession, is reprimanded for the violation of his body, within an institution in which he has virtually no agency. The attentive reader might 124

presume from reading Luiz’s reprimand that there existed some degree of consent, as they impress upon him never again to put himself in such a “compromising position”—even under threat of death. It can indelibly be discerned from reading his confession that the viability of such a demand proves impossible when one is the lawful property of another. Luiz’s criminalization under an institution that demands his submission, in addition to the non-presence and nonculpability of Luiz’s master throughout the trial proceedings, clearly evidence the extent to which black bodies lacked protection under the law. Darieck Scott informs us that “Homosexual rape…is not only that indoctrination by the dominant culture, but that rape, literal and metaphorical, material and psychological, is the very mode by which black men become black in the terms of white supremacy—that is, they become abjected, they become objects: they become acculturated (which is to say, dominated), in the history and in the present of history relentlessly recapitulates itself” (193).148 In line with Scott’s observations, Hortense J. Spillers in turn refers to the “pansexual potential” of the slave that is caused by gender failure resulting from dehumanization in/and enslavement (47). 149 Spillers's adumbration speaks to the utter vulnerability of the black body to any number of invasions by both men and women of the master class; it comments on the comprehensive condition of black people in slavery as socially and sexually abject. In this way, Spillers corroborates Winthrop Jordan, who summarizes adroitly, “Sexually, as well as in every other way, Negroes were utterly subordinated. White men extended their dominance over their

148

Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 149 Spillers, Hortense. Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.

125

Negroes to the bed, where the sex act itself served as a ritualistic enactment of the daily pattern of social dominance” (164).150 Sexual “Incitation” Acts of forced homosexual sex between master and slaves continued well into the late nineteenth century, as Pires de Almeida and historian Luiz Mott have copiously documented.151 The tyranny of these liaisons however, became interwoven into the institution of slavery, rendering interracial same-sex liaisons and their innate violence, an integral part of (be)coming a master or mistress. For as Luis Figari maintains: “Nenhum ser escapava a vontade arbitrária do senhor, mesmo suas mulheres e filhos. Meninos que cresciam com disciplina , rigor e violência física, a mesma violência que, sentindo-a em si mesmos, deviam aprender a infringir em seus subalternos . Reproduzir o ciclo de violência e sadismo em seu corpo para converter-se em ‘senhores’ de outros corpos” (Figari 320). [No being escaped the arbitrary will of the master, even his wife and children, Children were raised with discipline, rigor and physical violence, the same violence having experienced it themselves they learned to inflict upon their subalterns. To reproduce the cycle of violence and sadism in the body to become “masters” of other bodies.]152 Gilberto Freyre in his seminal text Casa Grande e Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves] has also documented what he understands to be the sexual initiation of the slave master’s children. The site of this initiation was the body of the slave child, (the moleque), who became the first object of sexual pleasure and practice: Através da submisão do muleque, seu companheiro de brinquedos e expressivamente chamado “ leva-pancadas”, inciou-se muitas vezes o menino branco no amor físico 150

Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1968. 151 See Luiz Mott’s Escravidão, Homosexualidade e Demonologia and Pires de Almeida’s Homosexualismo. 152 Translation mine.

126

(...)Quase que do muleque leva-pancadas se pode dize que desempenhou entre as grandes famílias escravocratas do Brasil as mesmas funções de paciente do senhor moço que na organização patrícia do Império Romano o escravo púbere escolhido para companheiro do menino aristocrata: espécia de vítima, ao mesmo tempo que camarada de briquedos, em que se exerciam os “premiers élan génesiqes” do filho-família. (220) [Through the submission of the black boy in the games that they played together, and especially the one know as leva-pancadas [“taking a drubbing”], the white lad was often initiated into the mysteries of physical love. As for the lad who took the drubbing, it may be said of him that, among the great slave-holding families of Brazil, he fulfilled the same passive functions toward his young master as did the adolescent slave under the Roman Empire who had been chosen to be the companion of a youthful aristocrat: he was a species of victim, as well as a comrade in those games in which the “premiers élan génesiques” of the son of the family found an outlet.] (250)153 It was through the systematic sexual domination of the slave child that the young master’s sexuality was fashioned— constituting an empirical knowledge of place and position through sex. Black sexuality becomes the terrain that is traversed, and violated in the making and concretizing of white masters, and the site at which racial domination is made manifest. In forced institutionalized homosexual sex, sexual and racial dominance work tandem through the sexual violation of the same sex, purposefully reproducing bourgeoning black manhood, womanhood, and sexuality in physical submission to white bodies. Freyre observes that this overwhelming obsession and manipulation of black sexuality was created by an unbalanced system of power: Não era o negro, portanto, o libertino: mas o escravo a serviço do interesse econômico e da ociosidade voluptuosa dos senhores. Não era a "raça inferior" a fonte de corrupção, mas o abuso de uma raça por outra. Abuso que implicava em conformar-se a servil com os apetites da todo poderosa.E esses apetites estimulados pelo ócio – pela "riqueza adquirida sem trabalho”... dentro de um regime como o da monocultura escravocrata, com uma maioria que trabalha e uma minoria que só faz mandar, nesta, pelo relativo ócio, se desenvolverá, necessariamente, mais do que naquela, a preocupação,a mania, ou o refinamento erótico.(579) [It was not the Negro, however, who was the libertine, but the slave who was at the service of his idle master’s economic interests and voluptuous pleasure. It was not the “inferior 153

Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-Grande & Senzala.Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro, 1998.

127

race” that was the source of corruption, but the abuse of one race by another, an abuse that demanded a servile conformity on the part of the Negro to the appetites of all-powerful lords of the land. Those appetites were stimulated by idleness, by a “wealth acquired without labor”…under a regime such as that of a slave-holding monoculture, where a majority labors and a minority does nothing but command, there will of necessity develop in the latter, by reason of its comparative leisure, a greater preoccupation with sexual matters, a greater degree of erotic mania, and more amorous refinements than in the case of the former.] (74-5) In accordance with Freyre’s observation we see that sadomasochism characterized and animated the master-slave dialectic. Like sadomasochism, the slave-master dialectic is performative because it requires contrivance: the donning of particular, simulated, and polarized master-slave roles. Through machinations of terror and torture, slaves learned to assume postures of passivity, and even complicity, in rituals designed to showcase the master's dominance.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Intra-gender violation during the slave regime was not solely unique to Brazil, but was a brutal fate that befell many men and women throughout the Black Atlantic. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs in 1861, chronicles the life of the author portraying her life as a slave and the violent psychic and sexual abuse she suffers in her escape to freedom. Jacobs’ narrative at its core renders a detailed account of the vicious nexus of sexual abuse, homoeroticism, and racial dominance in nineteenth century America. Jacobs’ tale charges slavery for its consumption, objectification and consumption of black bodies rendering the tyranny of sexual violence as the most tenacious evidence of the disparaging force of slavery on the individual, family, and wider community. I would like to underscore Jacobs’ evocation of the relationship between a male slave child by the name of Luke and his owner as an instantiation of eroticized intra-gender abuse. Jacobs intimates and locates Luke’s narrative, as Luiz da Costa’s, in the insolvency of gender 128

norms. Jacobs’ depiction of Luke’s punishment purposefully obfuscates the line between the homo-social and homosexual economy of the slave regime. This sadomasochistic depiction of same-sex abuse is employed by Jacobs to indicate the most profound, extreme, and baleful expression of enslavement. Luke’s narrative is summoned after both have managed to escape to freedom in the north. She recalls: “I was somewhat acquainted with a slave named Luke, who belonged to a wealthy man in our vicinity. His master died leaving a son and daughter heirs to his large fortune. In the division of slaves, Luke was included in the son's portion. The young man became prey to the vices growing out of the 'patriarchal institution'” (215-16).154 Luke is given as property to the son and establishes the context for homosexuality and dominance, as dominance is passed on as white male inheritance. The vice that Jacobs intimates is the young master’s homosexuality which is not described in this instance as sexual orientation or as an identity; rather, in accordance with Freyre’s aforementioned observations, the master's homosexual tendencies are attributed to the extreme wealth of his family and the unbridled freedom of white masculine privilege. It is patriarchal institution, with its emphasis on the master's privilege and his unfettered control over the bodies of others that Jacobs holds responsible for the master's homoerotic desires and behaviors. For her, the master is also prey to an institution that corrupts both its victims and its benefactors. In Jacobs’ account of homosexuality, she depicts the institution of slavery as a protective artifice under and through which the sexual and moral deviance of the master’s and mistresses could be veiled and protected. The vile despotism of the slave regime, equally, as she suggests, secretes and silences acts and behaviors that could be deemed as “non- heterosexual:” 154

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 1861. New York: Signet Classic, 2000.

129

... when [the young master] went north to complete his education, he carried his vices with him. He was brought home deprived of the use of his limbs, by excessive dissipation. Luke was appointed to wait upon his bed-ridden master, whose despotic habits were greatly increased by exasperation at his own helplessness. He kept a cowhide beside him, and, for the most trivial occurrence would order his attendant to bear his back, and kneel beside the couch, while he whipped him till his strength was exhausted. Sometimes he was not allowed to wear anything but his shirt in order to be in readiness to be flogged. (216) In Jacobs’ description of the master’s illness, she alludes to a potential sexually transmitted disease, further intimating the young master’s aberrant sexual practices. Yet, in his state of convalescence he continues to desire sexual pleasure and delectation, replacing his sexual organ with an alternative phallic object: the cowhide, which he uses to brutally inflict torture on Luke. Although Luke’s back is the site of his torture, the homoerotic/sexual contours of this torture are clearly evidenced in Luke having to undress and kneel before his master to receive his punishment. Luke spends days chained to his master bed wearing only a shirt—naked from the waist below as additional punishment. As we saw in Luiz da Costa’s confession, the slave body through intragender violation and rape not only becomes a perpetual locus of sexual pleasure, but its sexuality is rendered a site of projection, its objectification. As Darieck Scott points out: “rape and homosexuality…are closely linked, in that they both are used as a kind of short hand to signify the essential nature of white supremacy: that it is perverse and depraved and that is enforced through forms of sexual domination… The repeated use of these figures implicitly emphasizes that the history produces blackness and that black sexual history (and, by extension, American history as a whole since the production of blackness is such an integral part of its social, political, and economic fabric) is “queer” (Scott 177).

130

Further along in the narrative, Jacobs discloses to the reader that if Luke resisted his master’s punishment that the town constable (a man) would be summoned. In this instance the narrator relates a dialectic of homo-social/ homosexual bonding over the eroticized/ sexualized torture of Luke’s body. As the master’s condition worsens his torture of Luke becomes even more vicious. In his physical deterioration Luke’s torture and bondage evidenced by the literal chain that fetters him to his master’s bed are duplicitous, serving as material renderings not only of his invariable racial position within the institution of slavery, but the tandem pleasure and protection that it accords him: The fact that [the young master] was entirely dependent on Luke's care, and was obliged to be tended like an infant, instead of inspiring any gratitude or compassion towards his poor slave, seemed only to increase his irritability and cruelty. As he lay there on his bed, a mere wreck of manhood, he took into his head the strangest freaks of despotism; and if Luke hesitated to submit to his orders, the constable was immediately sent for. Some of these freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated. When I fled the house of bondage, I left poor Luke still chained to the bed of this cruel and disgusting wretch. (Jacobs 216) In this ritualized homosexual torture, Luke’s body, physical agency, and sexuality become subsumed in that of his owner. Luke is made to bear the burden of both his master’s sexuality and sexual malady. Abdur-Rahman underscores the centrality of examining constructions of deviant sexuality in slave testimonies as they “reveal painfully private aspects of slave experience and to provide a fitting metaphor of the experience and impact of institutional slavery” (18).

Sexual violence, with its elements of violation, bodily dispossession, psychic torture, and long-lived trauma, offers significant insight into what it felt like to be enslaved. By laying bare

131

the institutional practices and psychic structures that enabled the debasement of the black slave and the development of the white master-subject, slave narratives reveal how concepts of personhood, citizenship, and normalcy materialized with the hellacious subjugation of a population that was denied those very categories. In both accounts Luke and Luiz’s lack of agency, their absence of will and inability to resist, are subsumed and scripted as reputed consent in the eyes of the law. For Luke and Luiz, institution framed and dictated the ways in which they were able to tell their stories. Despite the power or agency that these narratives might presume, there exists a distortion, a rhetorical erasure in which the sufferings of these bodies persist. These voices intimate a history of violence, a perversion of will, too often neglected in our analysis of slavery— yet paradoxically, through silence and erasure they persist as witnesses—voices in dissent.

Bom Crioulo

Bom-Crioulo is an intricate novel that addresses multiple notions of both race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century Brazil. Caminha’s chef d’oeuvre, like the works discussed in previous chapters was received stridently and to much harangue. Caminha, who had a short and tragic life, was born in the northeast state of Ceará in 1867. He was orphaned at an early age and was taken to Rio de Janeiro by an uncle, who enrolled him in the naval school. Returning to Ceará in 1887 as a second lieutenant, he engrossed himself in the intellectual and political life of the northeastern state while embarking on an ardent love affair with the wife of an army officer. The resulting scandal led to his resignation from the Navy. He returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1892 with his paramour and worked as a low-

132

level clerk to support his literary career. On January 1, 1897, Caminha died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine.155 Caminha wrote Bom-Crioulo only seven years after the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888, and six years after military leaders overthrew the monarchy and established a republican government. The novel is set both on high sea and in Rio de Janeiro during an undefined year, when Emperor Dom Pedro II still reigned over the country. Caminha’s openness and detachment about the subject of homosexuality appalled period readers. A multitude of negative reactions to the book provoked Caminha to write a short response the following year. Um Livro Condenado, [A Condemned Book] appeared in the literary magazine A Nova Revista in which he characterized the public protest as an “inquisitional act of the critics,” and “perhaps the biggest scandal of the year.” Caminha also attacked the hypocrisy of Carioca intelligentsia who exalted European writers such as Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, and Eça de Queiroz, whose novels contained copious accounts of adultery, blasphemy, and immorality, yet condemned BomCrioulo. Caminha declares: “ Which is more pernicious: Bom-Crioulo, in which homosexuality is studied and condemned or those pages which are in circulation preaching in a philosophical tone the break-up of the family, concubinage, free love and sorts of social immorality?” (15) 156 Most criticism of Bom-Crioulo has tended to focus in great part on the novel’s overt depiction of homosexuality. David William Foster in Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing incorporates Bom- Crioulo in a canon of Gay literature—hailing it as the “Brazil’s and the modern western world’s first gay romance.” Foster has defined gay literature as: 155 156

See Sânzio Azevedo’s Adolfo Caminha: Vida e Obra and Adolfo Caminha’s Cartas Literarárias. Beattie, Peter M. The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2004.

133

writing about questions related to male homosexual identity, whether viewed as inherent character or chosen behavior. Such writing, he maintains, may either be explicit or more often before recent years; veiled; in the latter case it may be marked with clues taken to be explicit by the cognoscenti. Finally, writing about these issues may (typically) examine the tragedy of being homosexual or it may explore the persecutions and hypocrisies befalling the “unfortunate.”From the point of view of this definition of gay literature, are a group of writings not explicitly (or covertly) gay but marked by a presumed “gay sensibility” is not “admitted” (15).157 In the case of Bom- Crioulo I believe that such a distinction is not as simple as Foster has suggested. Rather, I contend that Caminha’s usage of homosexuality or same sex desire throughout the novel demands a more complex and rigorous analysis. It seems to me that critics have long focused on the spectacular or surface depiction of sex between a burly black sailor and a white adolescent cabin boy without posing a simple, or yet more provocative inquiry: why? Rather than “naming” the sex or subsuming it under a modern gaze, I am much more intrigued by the paradoxicality and complexity of its construction. Indeed, my intent here in this chapter is to explore what I perceive as the implicit allegorical nature of this novel—its deployment of homosexual interracial sex to place in relief critical questions of race, coloniality, and abolition—both their collisions and fatal repercussions. I maintain that Caminha’s BomCrioulo is not a novel about sexual deviance, gender, or the turn-of-the-century demimonde of Rio de Janeiro, but an interrogation of the ruses of power, freedom, institution, and historical exchanges between bodies. Bom-Crioulo is a novel in which time, historical and bodily demarcations are undefined and purposefully obfuscated— where each body is a border, a race and a nation, intricately orchestrated in an intense drama of the flesh. The homosexuality in the novel should not be read as a mere manifestation or expression of human sexuality, but is used allegorically and 157

Foster David William. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

134

metaphorically to illustrate and interrogate national (re)configurations of power. Exploring Caminha’s deployment of Machadian duplicity, I will further examine how this pre/post158 abolition novel shows not only a preoccupation with black sexuality, but frames black sexuality as a specter of the nation’s history of enslavement and colonialism. By using homosexuality as a lens Caminha employs its period conflation with prostitution to foreground continuity and repetition, by deconstructing the tenuous line between the homo-social and the homosexual inherent to both slavery and colonialism. To this end, I examine how Caminha links the relationships of dependence and disproportionate bodily exchanges inherent to slavery and colonialism with the thorny pleasures innate to the world of prostitution. In both instances pleasure and capital are situated in vexed and tenuous power relations between the consumer and the consumed—where the desire of the consumer veils consent and alters/ obfuscates the desire of the consumed body. By examining critical scenes I explore the textual intersections of rape, consent, interracial and pre/post emancipation desire to demonstrate how the bodies and sexualities within this text evidence and bespeak a sexual-national-narrative of violence.

Naturalism Bom-Crioulo is a product of the naturalist school, which at the end-of-the- century attempted to place in relief an ostensibly realistic depiction of the human condition. Heroes and heroines were dramatically transformed, privileging the men and women of the demimonde:

158

By delineating Bom-Crioulo as a pre/post abolition romance, I am underscoring its representation of both pre and post abolition Brazil.

135

(prostitutes, thieves, adulterers and the inhabitants of cortiços). However, on the other hand, naturalist literature can also be characterized, as we have seen, by its apocalyptic and moralistic endings in which the personages seek or find redemption or suffer a tragic end. It is within this framework that characters with deviant sexual desires and practices emerge from 1870 (Figari 282). In many respects, as Carlos Figari points out, naturalist literature was very similar to period medical discourse, as they equally assayed to decriminalize human behavior, positing society and environment as a central fundament in the formation of the individual. He observes that homoeroticism in naturalist literature and medical discourse was posited as a metaphor for sickness, and the “tragic images of the human condition.” This “malady” was promulgated by excess and perversion, and inevitably led to human beings death and destruction (Figari 285). O naturalismo literário irá descrever os mesmos casos que os médicos legistas em seus tratados; só se diferenciarão por seu caráter ficcional, mas em essência, se traçarmos um paralelismo entre um e outro, são idênticos. Homosexuais e lésbicas são apresentados com infâncias difíceis, pais alcólicos ou degenerados, vidas e relações complicadas, voluptuosas e, finalmente,trágicas. Sempre subjaz a moral burguesa reforçando o padrão de normalidae: vidas “ desregradas” terminam mal. O esquema é fechado, não há outra possibilidade de vida além da“correta” e pautada. (285) [Literary naturalism will go on to describe the same cases that the doctors reported in their patients.; they will only differ by one being a fictional character, but in essence if we were to establish a parallel between the two, they are identical. Homosexuals and lesbians are presented with difficult childhoods or alcoholic or degenerate parents, complicated, voluptuous lives and relationship, and finally tragic. Always affirming the bourgeois notion of normality: “wayward” lives end badly. The framework is closed, there is no other way to live other than the “correct” way.]159 Recent scholarship in sexuality studies has posited the late nineteenth century as the critical juncture at which sexual definitions emerged, coalescing in the oppositional figures of the homosexual and the heterosexual. Michel Foucault, suggests that though there had existed in the

159

Translation mine.

136

West religious, economic, judicial, and medical methods for tracking, categorizing, and punishing non-(re)productive sexualities since the eighteenth century, it was in the late nineteenth century that "peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals"(42-43).160 Medical, pedagogical, psychoanalytic, and judicial discourses around sexuality proliferated in this era, bringing with them new modes of naming and classifying individuals according to their illicit sexual preferences and practices. People whose sexual desire did not period notions of heteronormativity were now identified as, for example, auto-monosexualists, pedophiles, and homosexuals. In the late nineteenth century a nomenclature was created to identify these somatic identities. Perversities essentially were not only what one engaged in, they became the criteria for determining what one was. In his study of stereotypes, Sander Gilman has noted that one major category with which pathology is often associated is human sexuality. The sexual dimension of human experience, he argues, “is one of those most commonly divided into the “normal” and the “deviant”, the “good” and the “bad.” Human sexuality, given its strong biological basis, not unnaturally is often perceived as out of control of the self. Since fantasy is an innate part of human sexuality, it is not only the biological but also the physiological which can be understood as out of control” (Gilman 24). Despite the importance of late 19th century medical and legal discourses, which founded theories of sexual perversion and its punitive consequences, racial slavery, however, provided the background and the testing ground for the emergence and enunciation of those theories. The conflation of homosexuality and blackness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be found in the obfuscation and obliteration of traditional gender roles amongst the enslaved. It can 160

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

137

also be found in the widely accepted belief by Europeans that black sexuality in Africa was so libidinous, so unregulated, so wanton that not only did African men keep as many wives as they wanted but there existed as well "men in women's apparel, whom they [kept] among their wives" (330).161

Historians Winthrop Jordan and George Frederickson have noted that European beliefs about black sexuality developed out of their first contact with Africans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Upon arriving on African shores and encountering Africans who wore clothing befitting the hot climate and who practiced polygamy, Europeans concluded that Africans were sexual savages who had not undergone the disciplining regulation that civilization entails. They argue that these ideas were further propagated by scientific investigations in the nineteenth century that alleged that black people had abnormally large genitals and that the size and shape of their genitalia predetermined illicit sexual propensities. The "uninhibited sexuality" of black people was presumed to extend beyond degenerate heterosexuality to incorporate sexual violence, interracial desire, bestiality, and homosexuality. In other words, blackness was believed (throughout the slave era and beyond) to evince, and to provoke in others, an entire range of sexual perversions.162 As David Halperin describes: “All scientific inquiries into the aetiology of sexual orientation ... spring from a more or less implicit theory of sexual races, from the notion that there exist broad general divisions between types of human beings corresponding, respectively, to those who make a homosexual and those who make a heterosexual sexual object

161

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987. 162 See Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812.

138

choice”(50).163 Halperin proposes that the raced roots of sexual definitions must be uncovered: “When the sexual racism underlying such inquiries is more plainly exposed, their rationale will suffer proportionately” (50).164 In 19th century Brazilian medicine the notion of health was linked to the equilibration of desire. Passion, as the literature purports, was pernicious; a “healthy” sexuality, however, was seen as essential to physical and mental development and for the purposes of procreation. Carlos Figari has observed that this obsession with controlling the body was inherently linked to nationalist discourses of race and nation: Se o Estado é um corpo, e se a Nação e raça são os eixos da existência, é lógico que o equilíbrio do corpo social vai depender em grande parte de um discurso sobre uma “ Nação sadia”,que por sua vez deverá ser politicamente elaborado pela ciência médica. Nesse contexto, o homoerotismo, como muitas outras manifestações da sexualidade humana, aparecerá no campo dos desregrados, do desequilíbrio moral e mental, dentro da lógica do discurso médico de produzir conhecimento e criar novas categorias patológicas que ampliassem seu âmbito de intervenção semântica.(244) [If the State is a body, and if the Nation and race are elements of existence, it is logical that equilibrium of the social body is going to depend in great part on the discourse of a “healthy Nation,” that at the same time would be elaborated by scientific medicine. In this context, homoeroticism, like many manifestations of human sexuality, will appear in the field of the degenerates, of moral and mental equilibrium, within the logic of medical discourse to produce knowledge and create new pathological categories that would amplify the environment by way of semantic intervention.]165 Gilman attributes the naturalist obsession with naming and classifying bodies, as need to “distinguish the healer from the patient as well as the “healthy” from the “sick” (37).166 The first medical works regarding the question of homosexuality in Brazil were produced between 1869163

Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990. 164 Gilman maintains that what is important is that systems of representation during this period made these references of human sexuality overt. It is not a question of “interpreting in” the role of human sexuality, he avers that the nineteenth century (that age of supposed prudery) human sexuality became a topic of cultured discourse within both the culture of science and that of the arts” (27). 165 Translation mine. 166 For a cogent of analysis of the idea of social illness in Brazilian naturalist literature see Alexandra Montague’s “Contagious Identities: literary reponses to the sanitarist and eugenics movement in Brazil.”

139

1906. These works attributed homosexuality as an extension of prostitution. In 1872 Francisco Ferraz de Macedo, in his work on prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, homoeroticism is mentioned as a clandestine form of prostitution in which one found a host of “sickly” practices among them: lesbianism, same-sex masturbation, oral sex and the gravest of the offenses: sodomy amongst male prostitutes. Period medical discourse posited such sexual deviations as contagious bodily illnesses and an inherent form of degeneracy167: O discurso médico-legal, em síntese, traça definitivamente as formas psíquicas e somáticas da inversão masculina e feminina. Inversão ou homossexualismo adquirem uma entidade, que embora confusa e ambígua, pelo menos sedimentará uma “marca” que recairá sobre os indivíduos que praticam o homoerotismo: o estigma da degeneração e a enfermidade. Assim como os loucos, as histéricas, os vagabundos—até em certa medida os negros—,os homosexuais são uma ánomalia social que se combate, se rechaça, se reprime e se busca curar. (Figari 260) [Medical-legal discourse, synthesis, definitively traces the psychic and somatic forms of masculine and feminine inversion. Inversion or homosexuality acquires an entity that although confusing and ambiguous, at least will deposit a label that will befall the individuals that practice homoeroticism: the stigma of degeneration and sickness. Just as the mentally ill, hysterics, vagabonds—and to a certain extent blacks—homosexuals were a social anomaly to be combated, rejected, repressed and that they sought to cure.] 168

Embodying Bom-Crioulo’s Desire Our initial introduction to Bom-Crioulo is physical. Employing the 19th century American figure of the Black Buck, Caminha introduces him to the reader with abounding descriptions of his massive body, animalistic features, and brutish strength. The initial scene, through the surrounding commotion, draws the reader into the commencement of a violent erotized spectacle, where Bom-Crioulo is the center attraction: O motivo, porém, de sua prisão agora, no alto mar, a borda da corveta, era outro, muito outro: Bom-Crioulo esmurrara desapiedadamente um segunda classe, porque este ousara, 167

See Ferraz de Macedo, Francisco. Da Prostuição e Gera, e em Particualar na cidade de Rio de Janiero: prophyaxia da syphlis. Thesis ( Doutorado em Medicina, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, 1872. 168 Translation mine.

140

“sem o seu consentimento”, maltratar o grumete Aleixo, um belo marinheirito de olhos azuis , muito querido por todos e de quem diziam-se “cousas”. Metido em ferros no porão, Bom-Crioulo não deu palavra. Admiravelmente manso, quando se achava em seu estado normal, longe de qualquer influência alcoólica, submeteu-se à vontade superior, esperando resignado o castigo. – Reconhecia que fizera mal, que devia ser punido, que era tão bom quanto os outros, mas, que diabo! estava satisfeito: mostrara ainda uma vez que era homem... Depois estimava o grumete e tinha certeza de o conquistar inteiramente, como se conquista uma mulher formosa, uma terra virgem, um país de ouro... Estava satisfeitíssimo. A chibata não lhe fazia mossa; tinha costas de ferro para resistir como um Hércules ao pulso do guardião Agostinho. Já nem se lembrava do número das vezes que apanhara de chibata... Bom-Crioulo tinha despido a camisa de algodão, e, nu da cintura para cima, numa riquíssima exibição de músculos, os seios muito salientes, as espáduas negras reluzentes, um sulco profundo e liso d’alto a baixo no dorso, nem sequer gemia, como se estivesse a receber o mais leve dos castigos. Entretanto, já iam cinqüenta chibatadas! Ninguém lhe ouvira um gemido, nem percebera uma contorção, um gesto qualquer de dor. Viam-se unicamente naquele costão negro as marcas do junco, umas sobre as outras, entrecruzando-se como uma grande teia de aranha, roxas e latejantes, cortando a pele em todos os sentidos. De repente, porém, Bom-Crioulo teve um estremecimento e soergueu um braço: a chibata vibrara em cheio sobre os rins, empolgando o baixo-ventre. Fora um golpe medonho, arremessado com uma força extraordinária.(20)169 [The reason for his present imprisonment, however, on the high seas, on board the corvette was different, completely different, Bom-Crioulo had barbarously beaten up one of the second-class sailors because the fellow had dared, “ without his permission,” to mistreat Aleixo the cabin-boy, a handsome little blue-eyed sailor-boy, who was everybody’s favorite and about whom certain “things” were rumored…Shackled and chained in the hold, Bom-Crioulo didn’t utter a word of protest...He’d shown them once again that he was a man, And besides that, he was very fond of the cabin-boy, and he was sure that now he could win him over completely, the way one conquers a beautiful woman, a virgin wilderness, a land of gold. He was damn well satisfied! The cane didn’t leave a mark on him; he had a back of iron strong enough to resist the powerful arm of Agostinho… He couldn’t even remember any more how often he’d been caned…Bom-Crioulo had taken off his cotton-shirt, and was naked from the waist up, in a splendid display of muscles, his pectorals rippling, his black shoulder blades shining, a deep, smooth furrow running from top to bottom down the middle of his back, he didn’t even utter a groan, as if were receiving the lightest of punishments…But he’s already taken fifty strokes of the cane! No one had heard a moan coming from his lips, no one had noticed any contortion, any gesture at all indicating pain. All that could be seen on that ebony back was the marks left by the cane, one on top of the other, crisscrossing like a great cobweb, purple and throbbing, cutting the skin in all directions…But suddenly Bom-Crioulo shuddered and raised one arm. The cane had struck him full on the kidneys, affecting the lower stomach. It was a terrible blow, delivered with extraordinary force.] (35)170

169

Caminha, Adolfo. Bom- Crioulo. Rio de Janeiro, RJ : Artium, 1997. All English translations of Bom Crioulo are from: Caminha, Adolfo, Bom-Crioulo : the Black man and the cabin boy; translated from Portuguese by E.A. Lacey. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1982. 170

141

In this primal scene, Bom-Crioulo’s punishment, Caminha initially broaches the question of physical desire. Through the eroticized torture of the black body, Caminha renders an interpenetrative coup d’oeil into Bom-Crioulo’s desire and consciousness through his physical subjection. Bom Crioulo’s sexual desire is described as dormant prior to coming in contact with Aleixo. His desire is that through his pain, his endurance, his resistance to torture, he will awaken desire in or recognition from the cabin to regard him as a man. In this scene his manhood and sexual desire work in tandem, as they are both articulated through his resistance to physical pain. What is of interest here is the notion that black desire or more expressly black physical desire, is first introduced as being filtered through white approval and recognition. This scene not so ambiguously suggests that in establishing an affective connection with the white body, such a connection must be established through pain (in this case voluntary). Here it is posited that his desire can only be achieved in concert with white men (both his torture and his alluded sexual desire)—establishing homosocial/ sexual desire and practice in tandem. The paradox subsists in that Bom-Crioulo subverts the abjection associated with corporal punishment and the narrative of black torture and (re)appropriates it as a conduit of his own desire.

142

171

In analyzing the depiction of homosexuality in Bom-Crioulo critics have rightfully established its deployment of ancient Greek homosexuality. As Halperin describes: Sex is portrayed in Athenian documents not as a mutual enterprise in which two or more persons jointly engage but as an action performed by a social superior upon a social inferior…. Incentive and receptive sexual roles were therefore necessarily isomorphic with super ordinate and subordinate social status; an adult, male citizen of Athens could have legitimate sexual relations only with statutory minors (his inferior not in age but in social and political status): the proper targets of his sexual desire included, specifically, women of any age, free males past the age of puberty who were not yet old enough to be a citizens …. As well as foreigners and slaves of either sex ….the male citizens superior prestige and authority expressed themselves in his sexual prudence—his power to initiate a sexual act, his right to obtain pleasure from it, and his assumption of an incentive rather than a receptive sexual role… each act of sex no doubt of real, personal desires had already been shaped by the shared culture definition of sex as an activity that generally occurred only between a citizen and non-citizen, between a person invested with full civil status and a statutory minor.(25) While I would also aver Caminhas’s deployment of same-sex eroticism, I believe that criticism has also failed to address a critical component of this paradigm. Homosexuality, as Halperin describes, was a part of becoming a good citizen. Citizenship was defined as a homo-

171

Web. 2 May 2011. .

143

social construct—an institution, and physical enterprise between men. It is necessary to underscore that these relationships were also an ephemeral act toward a political project, which ended upon the maturation of the adolescent. In Bom- Crioulo there also exists a relationship of bodily exchanges toward a larger political construct or ideal. However, Caminha places this historical narrative of same-sex desire within what I would delineate as a pre/post abolition continuum, coupling it with the contemporary “problematic” of race. Within the context, the construct of institutionalized desire is dramatically altered, as the signification of the sexual relationships connote a more complex dynamic. Caminha complicates the construct of Greek same-sex eroticism by placing it within the purview of slavery and colonialism—two simultaneous and mutually constitutive homosocial institutions built and fashioned upon male sexual desire. Caminha further establishes this interplay in Bom-Crioulo’s relation to women: Não se lembrava de ter amado nunca ou de haver sequer arriscado uma dessas aventuras tão comuns na mocidade, em que entram mulheres fáceis, não: pelo contrário, sempre fora indiferente a certas cousas, preferindo antes a sua pândega entre rapazes a bordo mesmo, longe das intriguinhas e fingimentos de mulher. Sua memória registrava dois fatos apenas contra a pureza quase virginal de seus costumes, isso mesmo por uma eventualidade milagrosa: aos vinte anos, e sem o pensar, fora obrigado a dormir com uma rapariga em Angra dos Reis, perto das cachoeiras, por sinal dera péssima cópia de si como homem; e mais tarde, completamente embriagado, batera em casa de uma francesa no largo do Rocio, donde saíra envergonhadíssimo, jurando nunca mais se importar com “essas cousas”...(25) [He couldn’t remember ever having been in love before or even having ventured on one of those affairs with prostitutes that are so common in young men’s lives. No, on the contrary, he had always been indifferent to things like that, and had preferred carousing with the boy’s right there on board. Far from women’s intrigues and deceits, he recalled only two exceptions to the almost virginal purity of his life and habits, and they had both happened by a sort of miraculous accident. When he was twenty, he was unexpectedly forced to sleep with a girl in Angra dos Reis, near the waterfalls and his performance as a man on that occasion had, incidentally, left a great deal to be desired. Sometime after that, once, in a state of complete drunkenness, he had knocked on the door of a French prostitute’s house in Rocio square. He had come out of that house quite ashamed of himself and had sworn never again to have anything to do with those things.] (38) 144

All of the women in the aforementioned quote, and curiously throughout the novel are licentious, of ill repute, and above all powerless. In this regard, one could rightfully aver that Bom-Crioulo’s physical attraction or desire for women is counteracted by their relative lack of societal influence. Within the confines of patriarchal society white men possessed all political power and material wealth, and women, much less black women, and women of unfavorable social stations, were rendered virtually powerless in a white-male dominated society. As such, due to women’s perceived lack of material power and societal influence, Bom-Crioulo has no “use” for them. In this regard, it is important to underscore that Bom-Crioulo’s erotic desire is conceived by the potential use or significance of the object of desire in relation to his societal and racial lot. Bom-Crioulo as former slave, ship-worker and pre/post-emancipation subject eroticizes white male power, influence, and more precisely sees this power and pleasure as being obtained and conceived between men. In this sense, he purposefully links upward mobility, citizenship, and the idea of freedom and pleasure to the white male body. In Bom-Crioulo human relationships are fundamentally established and resolved through exchanges, and based solely upon homo desire. This can be evidenced in the following scene in which Bom-Crioulo yearns to switch ships: Tinha um forte desejo ainda: suspirava por embarcar em certo navio, cujo comandante, um fidalgo, dizia-se amigo de todo marinheiro robusto; excelente educador da mocidade, perfeito cavalheiro no trato ameno e severo. Bom-Crioulo conhecia-o de vista somente e ficara simpatizando imensamente com ele. Demais, o comandante Albuquerque recompensava os serviços de sua gente, não se negava a promover os seus afeiçoados. Isso de se dizer que preferia um sexo a outro nas relações amorosas podia ser uma calúnia como tantas que inventam por aí... Ele, Bom-Crioulo, não tinha nada que ver com isso. Era uma questão à parte, que diabo! ninguém está livre de um vício. (35)

145

[He still had one cherished desire. He longed to embark on a certain ship, whose captain, a member of the Brazilian nobility, was said to be particularly partial to well-built sailors; he was also known as an excellent trainer of young men and a perfect gentleman, sever but amiable in his dealings with his crew. Bom Crioulo knew him only by sight but had taken an immense liking to him. Besides Captain Albuquerque rewarded good work; he was never unwilling to promote his favorites. The rumour that he preferred one sex to another in his amorous relations was probably calumny and slander, like so many stories that people invent. As far as Bom Crioulo was concerned that was none of his business. That was a private matter. What the hell, everybody has some bad habit.] (43) Rather ambiguously, the narrative voice intimates the captain’s sexual preference, and curiously indentifies him as a member of the Brazilian nobility. I would argue that this detail is not gratuitous; rather, it suggests that homosexuality is not a “disease” or condition isolated to the demimonde, but existed in and permeated all levels of Brazilian society.

Bom-Crioulo, prior to expressing his own homosexual desire, desires to be with Captain Albuquerque. It is important to note that this desire, however, is fundamentally linked to upward mobility and not to sexual or physical in nature. Bom-Crioulo’s “desire” to be used by Captain Albuquerque in exchange for a more favorable station locates Bom-Crioulo within Caminha’s overarching tropology of prostitution. The captain, aside from, or perhaps in connection with his intimated desire, rewards, and is partial to “well-built” sailors, who in exchange for their physical deeds they are granted a higher station. Bom Crioulo’s takes the knowledge of the captain’s “partiality” in the hopes of using his body as a means of renegotiating his position. Darieck Scott argues that “the black male, in his history as African slave, is/was the object of control or desire for the White Father; the subjectivity imposed on him as object—a position analogous to that occupied by women. He resists this imposition in various ways while nevertheless being simultaneously drawn into a vexed and emotionally invested identification with white male power” (286).

146

It must be understood that the Navy and slavery are both institutions in which mobility and protection can only be achieved in concert with men. It was slavery that besieged BomCrioulo’s freedom, and the Navy that offered him the paradoxical and limited freedom that he endures. As his sole form of currency is his body, he perpetually uses it to trouble power dynamics and establish affective bonds.

Pires de Almeida and Herculano Lassance Cunha have documented relatively high rates of homosexual practices in the turn-of-the-century Brazilian Navy and armed forces. Pires de Almeida notes that same sex dwellings such as prisons, the Navy, military schools and the army were often loci for the diffusion of homosexual practices. Herculano Lassance Cunha also found that in the armed forces “a sodomia se estendeu a tal ponto que são poucos os que não a praticam. Era difícil que os oficiais não tivessem também um ou dois “ camaradas” que lhes proporcionassesm “tais desonestos serviços.”[Sodomy extended to such a extent to the point that there were few that did not practice it. It was difficult for the officials not to have one or two “camarades” to provide “such dishonest services] (75-76).172 Decades earlier Ferraz de Macedo in 1873 suggested that the high rates of sodomy between soldiers could be attributed to the lack of “female company” and pervasive sexual coercion of higher ranking officers to satisfy their sexual desires.173 Curiously, homosexuality being considered an illness and aberrance of the poor and dispossessed was for many years relatively tolerated in the Armed Forces. The Armed Forces, as Figari has noted, (as is the case in Bom-Crioulo) served to recruit the lower levels of society, or

172

Augusto Herculano Lassance. Dissertação sobre a Prostitição, em particular em relação à cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Thesis ( Doutorado em Medicina, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, 1872. 173 Ferraz de Macedo, 1872.

147

per Figari “os elementos indesejavéis da sociedade” [the most undesirable elements of society] (165). Embodying Aleixo After the initial act of consummation between Bom-Crioulo and Aleixo, Bom-Crioulo takes the initiative to prepare a dwelling for the two of them. Renting a room from his trusted friend Carolina, they install themselves in the ragged decadent boarding house that at once serves as the first instance of home for Bom-Crioulo, while turning into a virtual physical prison for Aleixo: Bom-Crioulo, desde a primeira noite dormida no sobradinho, começou a experimentar uma delícia muito íntima, assim como um recolhido gozo espiritual – certo amor à vida obscura daquela casa onde ultimamente quase ninguém ia, e que era o seu querido valhacouto de marujo em folga, o doce remanso de sua alma voluptuosa. Não sonhava melhor vida, conchego mais ideal: o mundo para ele resumia-se agora naquilo: um quartinho pegado às telhas, o Aleixo e ... nada mais! Enquanto Deus lhe conservasse o juízo e a saúde, não desejava outra cousa. O quarto era independente, com janela para os fundos da casa, espécie de sótão, ruído pelo cupim e tresandando a ácido fênico. Nele morrera de febre amarela um portuguesinho recém chegado. Mas Bom-Crioulo, conquanto receasse as febres de mau caráter, não se importou com isso, tratando de esquecer o caso e instalandose definitivamente. Todo dinheiro que apanhava era para a compra de móveis e objetos de fantasia rococó, “figuras”, enfeites, cousas sem valor, muita vez trazida de bordo... Pouco a pouco o pequeno “cômodo” foi adquirindo uma feição nova de bazar hebreu, enchendo-se de bugigangas, amontoando-se de caixas vazias, búzios grosseiros e outros acessórios ornamentais. O leito era uma “cama de vento” já muito usada, sobre a qual Bom-Crioulo tinha o zelo de estender, pela manhã, quando se levantava, um grosso cobertor encarnado “para ocultar as nódoas.” (69) [From the very first night he slept in the upstairs room, Bom-Crioulo began to feel a special, intimate pleasure, as well as a sort of solitary spiritual joy – a certain love for the obscure life of that house which of late almost no one visited and which was his beloved refuge, the refuge of the sailor resting from his labours, the sweet repose of his voluptuous soul. He couldn’t imagine a better life, a more ideal, comfortable shelter. The world was now summed up for him in this: a little room under the eaves, Aleixo and…nothing more! As long as God kept him in sound mind and good health, there was nothing else he wanted. The room was separate from the rest of the house, with a window looking down into the yard. It was a sort of attic, termite-riddled and stinking of carbolic –acid. A young Portuguese immigrant who had recently arrived had died there of yellow fever. But though Bom-Crioulo feared the more dangerous fevers, he paid no attention to this fact he tried to forget the matter and settled in once and for all. All the money he could lay his hands on 148

went to buy furniture and fancy little rococo objects, figurines, decorations things of no value often brought from onboard ship. Little by little the tiny room acquired the appearance of a Jewish bazaar, as it filled up with bric-a-brac, and accumulated empty boxes, vulgar seashells and other ornamental accessories. The bed was an already much used folding canvas one, over which Bom-Crioulo carefully spread a thick red blanket every morning, when he got up,“ to hide the stains.”](74-76) Much like Azevedo’s Raimundo, Bom-Crioulo yearns for an end to his vicious cycle of displacement. Both slavery and his work as a sailor serve as forms of dislocation, destroying any capability of establishing or maintaining a home. Referring to the house as a refuge, we observe in Bom-Crioulo’s creation of home, a state or space that it is in fact to be created through much labor and sacrifice, and is not something that is given freely to him. Though Bom-Crioulo has stayed in this place several times with his friend Carolina, whose affections and friendship he too wins with his body,174 the space does not connote refuge or bespeak a sense of belonging until Aleixo inhabits it. Conceived in illegitimate dwellings, the trope of desire and place are yet again linked to the white male body. Regarding Aleixo as metonymical for the Brazilian nation, Bom-Crioulo links his body to the creation and fashioning of domesticity and affect. Curiously, though Aleixo embodies the space, his voice or relation to it is never articulated, as it is seemingly consumed and narrated through Bom-Crioulo’s gaze. At the center of the room, paradoxically, lies the bed that bears the stains of Bom-Crioulo’s self-consuming sexual desire—tenaciously linking the notions of home, belonging and sexual desire. The ever present stains and wet dreams that he scurries to secrete are manifestations of his longing and unconsummated desire. As we have seen, 19th century medical literature advocated for the equilibrium of desire. Period literature accordingly attributed homosexuality to 174

I am referring to the back-story of Bom-Crioulo and Carolina’s friendship. Bom-Crioulo wins her friendship after saving her from a brutal attack by a former “client.”

149

masturbatory and sexual excess. The presence of masturbation and wet dreams throughout the text as material renderings of Bom-Crioulo’s uncontrollable and unbridled sexual urges aid to foreshadow Aleixo’s sexual enslavement: Uma cousa desgostava o grumete: os caprichos libertinos do outro. Porque Bom-Crioulo não se contentava em possuí-lo a qualquer hora do dia ou da noite, queria muito mais, obrigava-o a excessos, fazia dele um escravo, uma “mulher-a-toa” propondo quanta extravagância lhe vinha à imaginação. Logo na primeira noite exigiu que ele ficasse nu, mas nuzinho em pêlo: queria ver o corpo... Aleixo amuou: aquilo não era cousa que se pedisse a um homem! Tudo menos aquilo. Mas o negro insistiu: Ninguém o levava a capricho:— Ou bem que somos ou bem que não somos... – Que asneira! fez o grumete. Por-se agora nu em pêlo defronte do Bom-Crioulo ! Está visto que tinha vergonha.Vergonha de quê? tornou o outro. Não és homem como eu? Donde veio essa vergonha? De certo!...Ora, deixa-te de luxo, menino, vamos: tira a roupa...Havia luz no quarto, uma luz mortiça. no topo de uma vela de sebo. Nem se vê nada... fez Aleixo choramingando, sem lágrimas. Sempre há se de se ver alguma cousa...E o pequeno, submisso e covarde, foi desabotoando a camisa de flanela, depois as calças, em pé, colocando a roupa sobre a cama, peça por peça. Estava satisfeita a vontade de BomCrioulo. Aleixo surgia-lhe agora em pleno e exuberante nudez, muito alvo, as formas roliças de calipígio ressaltando na meia sombra voluptuosa do aposento, na penumbra acariciadora daquele ignorado e impudico santuário de paixões inconfessáveis... Belo modelo de efebo que a Grécia de Vênus talvez imortalizasse em estrofes de ouro límpido e estátuas duma escultura sensual e pujante. Sodoma ressurgia agora numa triste e desolada baiúca da Rua da Misericórdia, onde àquela hora tudo permanecia numa doce quietação de ermo longínquo.Vejlogo... murmurou o pequeno, firmando-se nos pés. Bom-Crioulo ficou extático! A brancura láctea e maciça daquela carne tenra punha-lhe frêmitos no corpo, abalando-o nervosamente de um modo estranho, excitando-o como uma bebida forte, atraindo-o, alvoroçando-lhe o coração. Nunca vira formas de homem tão bem torneadas, braços assim, quadris rijos e carnudos como aqueles... Faltavam-lhe os seios para que Aleixo fosse uma verdadeira mulher!... Que beleza de pescoço, que delícia de ombros, que desespero!...Dentro do negro rugiam desejos de touro ao pressentir a fêmea... Todo ele vibrava, demorando-se na idolatria pagã daquela nudez sensual como um fetiche diante de um símbolo de ouro ou como um artista diante duma obra prima. Ignorante e grosseiro, sentia-se, contudo, abalado até os nervos mais recônditos, até às profundezas do seu duplo ser moral e físico, dominado por um quase respeito cego pelo grumete que atingia proporções de ente sobrenatural a seus olhos de marinheiro rude.Basta! ... suplicou Aleixo. Não, não! Um bocadinho mais...Bom-Crioulo tomou a vela, meio trêmulo, e, aproximando-se, continuou o exame atencioso do grumete, palpando-lhe as carnes, gabando-lhe o cheiro da pele, no auge da volúpia, no extremo da concupiscência, os olhos deitando chispas de gozo...Acabou-se! tornou Aleixo depressa, impaciente já, soprando a luz. Seguiu-se, então, no escuro, um ligeiro duelo de palavras gemidas à surdina. e, quando Bom-Crioulo riscou o fósforo, ainda uma vez triunfante, mal podia ter-se em pé. Tais eram os “desgostos” de Aleixo. (26-27) 150

[Only one thing vexed the cabin-boy—the black man’s sexual whims. Because BomCrioulo was not satisfied merely with possessing him sexually at any hour of the day or night. He wanted much more; obliged the boy to go to extremes, he made a slave, a whore of him, suggesting to him that they perform every extravagant act that came into his mind. The very first night he wanted Aleixo to strip, to strip right down to the buff: he wanted to see his body. Aleixo replied sulkily that that wasn’t something you asked a man to do! Anything but that. But the black man insisted. Nobody was going to change his mind or take that desire away from him: “either we’re friends or we’re not.” He knew that he was ashamed to do that. “Ashamed of what?” replied the black man. “Where did this shame’ come from? Aren’t you a man like me?” “Of course I am!” “Then stop being so fussy; come on, take off your clothes.” There was light in the room, a pale, dying light, from the wick of a tallow candle. “You can’t even see anything” whimpered Aleixo tersely “you can always see something” and the boy, obedient and afraid, slowly unbuttoned his flannel shirt and then his trousers. He was standing, and he placed his clothes on the bed, item by item. Bom-Crioulo’s desire was satisfied. Aleixo appeared before him now in full, exuberant nudity, his skin very white, and his curvaceous buttocks standing out in the voluptuous semi-darkness of the room, in the caressing half-shade of that unknown and shameless sanctuary of passions that have not been mentioned. He was a lovely model of male adolescence such as Greece of venues would perhaps immortalize in stanzas of limpid gold and statues of a sculpture both powerful and sensual. Sodom was reborn in a sad, desolate hotel on Miséricordia Street, which at that hour was submerged in the sweet tranquility of an isolated hermitage. “Look and get it over with,” mumbled the boy, steadying his feet. Bom-Crioulo was in ecstasy! The solid, milky whiteness of that tender flesh made his whole body tremble, affecting his nerves in a strange way, exciting him like a soft drink, attracting him , stirring his heart. He had never seen such a beautifully rounded male body, such arms, such firm, fleshy hips, with breast, Aleixo would be a real woman, what a marvelous neck, what delightful shoulders- it was enough to drive a man crazy! All the raging desire of the bull when he senses the presence of the female roared within the black man. His whole being was shaken, tarrying over that sensual nudity in pagan idolatry like a worshipper before a gold ikon or an artist in the presence of a masterpiece. Ignorant and coarse, he nevertheless felt moved to his very innermost roots, to the depths of his normal and physical nature; he felt himself dominated by an almost blind respect for cabin-boy; who, in his eyes, the eyes of a mere crude sailor, attained the proportions of a supernatural being. “that’s enough” implored Aleixo “no no! just a little bit longer” Bom-Crioulo took up the candle trembling, and coming closer, continued his detailed examination of the cabin-boy feeling flesh, praising the perfume of his skin, at the peak of lustfulness, at the extremity of desire, his eyes darting sparks of pleasure. “that’s all!” said Aleixo suddenly, impatient now, and blew out the candle. There followed then, in the darkness, a slight skirmish of whispered words and groans. And when Bom-Crioulo, once more triumphant, lit a match, he could hardly stand on his own two feet. These were the “vexations” that Aleixo had to bear.] (30-31)

151

As many critics have pointed out, Bom-Crioulo and Aleixo’s relationship is indeed a reversal of roles.175 Utilizing his relative resources and privilege, Bom-Crioulo subverts the spectacularization of the black body by rendering Aleixo a sexual slave. This scene creates a direct dialectic with the slave auction block—a fate historically relegated to black slaves. Caminha draws on this historical narrative in which black slaves were disrobed, regarded and objectified for the scrutiny of potential buyers and masters, and undermines it by rendering the black subject as both the viewer and the consumer. The pain, shame and objectification intrinsic to the auction block are subverted and appropriated as a source of pleasure for Bom-Crioulo, and displaced onto Aleixo’s body. The line that culminates in the sexual encounter between Bom-Crioulo and Aleixo “these were the vexations that he had to bear,” discloses that Aleixo, suffers the violence of BomCrioulo’s desire. In analyzing this “suffering of desire,” the question of consent must be critically examined. Consent in this sequence, and indeed throughout the narrative, is virtually imperceptible; and, the practice of these sexual acts is inherently linked to shame, objectification, coercion and tacit violence. Sex and submitting to Bom-Crioulo’s desire are by no means pleasurable for Aleixo. Rather, I would suggest that his complicated submission interfused with its recondite and enshrouded consent, resolutely function in the form of rape. For Scott, rape and homosexuality are closely linked, in that they both are “used as a kind of short hand to signify the essential nature of white supremacy: that it is perverse and depraved and that is enforced through forms of sexual domination” (186). They both essentially serve, Scott maintains, as metaphors for the “vicious inequalities of America’s racial caste system and points to the shadowy historical fact that sexual exploitation of black people has been intrinsic to 175

See David William Foster’s Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing.

152

white supremacy in America, and it viscerally evokes the depth of psychic damage done to black people by such a system of domination, because since the 1920s, sexuality had increasingly come to be understood as an area in which one’s deepest self was expressed.(Scott,186)” Scott’s observations corroborate literary scholar Marlon Ross’s examination of what he has delineated as the “race rape” metaphor that he finds recurring in post-war African American literature.176 As evidenced in the stories of Luke and Luiz, their acquiescence in the threat of injury was purported as consent. Here the line between rape and consent is seemingly obfuscated in Bom-Crioulo’s “racialized” gaze. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has described this gaze as “a desire to know on the one hand, and master through representation on the other” (93).177 As the black gaze essentially serves as the conduit of black desire, black bodies and black desire are regarded as predatory, corruptive and pernicious for white bodies because they have been historically repudiated, pained and suffered. The other, Gilman maintains, “is the antithesis of the self and is thus that which defines the group (that which has robbed the self of power but in exchange provided it with protection) the other is therefore both ill and infectious, both damaged and damaging” (129-30). Gilman further underscores that in the turn-of-the-century, black sexuality, like that of the Jew, was classed as a disease. As such, we might consider black desire and sexuality (constructed in abjuration)178, in its projection, as serving as a locus of violence, destruction and decay both for itself and white bodies. This is ever apparent in the textual humiliation and degradation the white body (Aleixo) suffers in ceding to the pleasures of the black body.

176

Ross. Marlon B. “Race, Rape, Castration”. in Callaloo (Winter 2000): 290-312. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 178 I am suggesting here that the black body as a fundament of black desire within the institution of slavery was constructed and fashioned in repudiation and disavowal of pershonhood. 177

153

In Bom-Crioulo, the sexual is the terrain at which the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism explode. Recalling Luke and Luiz’s stories, I would ask what are the political implications of a former slave to sexually govern a white male body—to stake physical claims based on a tacit form of ownership—to veil and consume his consent and will him a slave? If we juxtapose Luke and Luiz’s story vis-à-vis Bom-Crioulo’s we might discern that Caminha recovers, subverts and dramatizes an oft neglected and silenced form of violence in the Brazilian historical narrative—a narrative of same-sex violence, debasement and domination. In this relationship, Caminha recreates the same, though expressly more complex, relationship between master and slave, as Aleixo’s consent and Bom-Crioulo’s desire are achieved through the threat of physical violence. Theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton has observed that due to the specter of history and its implicitly disparate and vexed power relations, between black and white masculinities, representations of interracial same-sex desire are depicted as inherently tragic and violent. For as she elegantly states “for what could be born was not a baby, but a corpse” (220).179 According to Darieck Scott, homosexuality, paradoxically does double duty; it is a figure that shouts a warning at the end point of a capitulation to white supremacy, because the homosexual fails to conform to hetero-normative ideals of procreation; simultaneously, it is a figure that represents the crimpling legacies of slavery, “for homosexuality- especially homosexuality with a sadomasochistic slant serves as the mode of transmission of white supremacy” (186). As Marlon Ross observes, evoking homosexuality transfers the “historical

179

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: “Where Black Meets “Queer.” Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2006.

154

fact” of the rape of black women (and the history of white domination through sexual control for which the rape serves as a handy metaphor) into a male only domain.180 Throughout the narrative, Bom-Crioulo worries incessantly about the cessation of his relationship with Aleixo—a relationship of contrived affection and material dependence. Observing their relationship a bit closer will reveal that the depiction or construct of homosexuality is fundamentally established through a notion of gratitude, respect and debt. Bom-Crioulo is never worried if in fact the boy finds him physically attractive or desires him sexually, but whether this relationship of dependence, monetary/ capital exchanges, and protection can be found elsewhere. Or in other words, Bom-Crioulo’s desire is not to be desired, but needed. Allegorically, period politicians were already in the beginning stages of cultivating white European immigration for Brazil’s incipient whitening projects. Post abolition politics sought to replace black slave labor with that of European immigrants, without dealing with its ever-present black population. As George Reid Andrews contends, “beyond the goal of Europeanizing the state… the state’s primary purpose was to reverse the economic consequences of the “revolution” of emancipation, and to restore landowner control over labor force. By the early 1880’s its impacts were already evident, particularly among the recent beneficiaries of emancipation: the Afro-Brazilians” (53).181Like Brazil, Aleixo delights in and profits from BomCrioulo’s protection and monetary gain, yet is equally repulsed by his person.182 In this sense, Caminha metonymically plays with the narrative of desire, dependence and revulsion inherent both to slavery and colonialism. Bom- Crioulo’s pursuit of Aleixo and the work that Bom180

Ross. Marlon B. “Race, Rape, Castration”. Andrews, George Reid. Black and Whites in São Paulo 1888-1980. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 182 I am making the claim the Aleixo serves an allegorical construction of the Brazilian nation. 181

155

Crioulo’s puts in to “create Aleixo” is metonymical for the land that he also has worked to shape and create as a slave and longs to possess and inhabit. The tyranny and violence of BomCrioulo’s desire abides in his cognizance of the transience, superficiality and materiality of the relationship. As such, there prevails an unrequited love for a body, a nation, to which he will never belong. After the initial scene, the narrator moves back in time and we are afforded Bom-Crioulo’s back-story: Inda estava longe, bem longe a vitória do abolicionismo, quando Bom-Crioulo, então simplesmente Amaro, veio, ninguém sabe donde, metido em roupas d’algodãozinho, trouxa ao ombro, grande chapéu de palha na cabeça e alpercatas de couro cru. Menor (teria dezoito anos), ignorando as dificuldades por que passa todo homem de cor em um meio escravocrata e profundamente superficial como era a Corte – ingênuo e resoluto, abalou sem ao menos pensar nas conseqüências da fuga. Nesse tempo o “negro fugido” aterrava as populações de um modo fantástico. Dava-se caça ao escravo como aos animais, de espora e garrucha, mato a dentro, saltando precipícios, atravessando rios a nado, galgando montanhas... Logo que o fato era denunciado – aqui-del-rei! – enchiam-se as florestas de tropel, saiam estafetas pelo sertão num clamor estranho, medindo pegadas, açulando cães, rompendo cafezais. Conseguindo, porém, escapar à vigilância dos interessados, e depois de curtir uma noite, a mais escura de sua vida, numa espécie de jaula com grades de ferro, Amaro, que só temia regressar à “fazenda”, voltar ao seio da escravidão, estremeceu diante de um rio muito largo e muito calmo, onde havia barcos vogando em todos os sentidos, à vela, outros deitando fumaça, e lá em cima, beirando a água, um morro alto, em ponta, varando as nuvens, como ele nunca tinha visto... No mesmo dia foi para a fortaleza, e , assim que a embarcação largou do cais a um impulso forte, o novo homem do mar sentiu pela primeira vez toda a alma vibrar de uma maneira extraordinária, como se lhe houvessem injetado no sangue de africano a frescura deliciosa de um fluido misterioso. A liberdade entrava-lhe pelos olhos , pelos ouvidos, pelas narinas, por todos os poros, enfim, como a própria alma da luz, do som, do odor e de todas as cousas etéreas... Ele, o escravo, o “negro fugido” sentia-se verdadeiramente homem, igual aos outros homens, feliz de o ser, grande como a natureza, em toda a pujança viril da sua mocidade, e tinha pena, muita pena dos que ficavam na “fazenda” trabalhando, sem ganhar dinheiro, desde a madrugada té ... sabe Deus! A disciplina militar, como todos os seus excessos, não se comparava ao penoso trabalho da fazenda, ao regimen terrível do tronco e do chicote. Havia muita diferença... Ali ao menos, na fortaleza, ele tinha sua maca, seu travesseiro, sua roupa limpa, e comia bem, a fartar, como qualquer pessoa. (20) [It was still long before the abolition of slavery, when Bom-Crioulo, then known simply as Amaro, appeared, coming from God knows where, dressed in rough cotton clothes, his 156

pack on his shoulder and a big straw hat on his head, wearing raw-leather sandals. Still a teenager ( he must have been about eighteen) and knowing nothing of the difficulties facing any colored man in a slave-based, profoundly superficial society like the Brazilian Empire, innocent and determined, he had run away without even thinking of the consequences of his flight. In those days the “runway Negro” terrified the whole population to an unbelievable extent. People chased the errant slave like a wild animal, with a spur and crossbow, following him into the jungle, leaping over chasms, swimming across rivers, climbing mountains. As soon as the disappearance of a slave was communicated to the authorities—help! Help!- troops of horse-men scoured the woods, and couriers raced through the backlands with wondrous clamour, measuring foot prints, spurring on the hunting dogs, smashing down coffee plantations…. Amaro succeeded, however, in eluding the vigilance of all interested parties. After the bitter experience of spending a night, the darkest of his life, in a short cage with iron gratings, the young black man, whose only fear was of being returned to the “plantation,” to the bosom of slavery, trembled with emotion at the a sight of a very wide, very calm river, where boats and ships were being rowed in all directions, while others gave off plumes of smoke, and, far above, on the edge of the water, a high, pointed mountain, taller than he’s ever seen before, pierced the clouds….That same day he was sent to the Fort. And as soon as the sloop, after a strong shove, pulled away from the dock, the new seaman felt his whole soul vibrate, for the first time, in an extraordinary fashion, as if the delicious coolness of some mysterious fluid had been injected into his hot African blood. Freedom poured in on him, through his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, through every pore, in short, like the very essence of light, sound, smell and of everything intangible… The slave, the “runaway Negro” felt he was a real man, equal to other men, happy to be a man, as big as the world itself, with all the virile strength of his youth. And he felt sorry, he felt very sorry for those who’d stayed behind on the “plantation”, working, working, without any salary, from crack of dawn till…God knows when!...Military discipline, with all its excesses, couldn’t even be compared to the hard labour of the plantation, to the terrible rule of stock and whip. There was a world of difference. Here at least he had a hammock, his pillow and his clean clothes. And he ate well, he stuffed himself, like any citizen.] (39)

Here the narrator places Bom-Crioulo’s back-story within the larger historical and temporal context of slavery and abolition. The narrator within the narrative functions in the capacity of retrospective historical and societal memory that locates Bom-Crioulo’s freedom within a narrative of criminalization and national anxiety. In Brazil, the United States, and throughout the Atlantic, there existed the salient preoccupation with the runaway slave and potential slave revenge. Accordingly, drastic measures were taken such as increased violence in the form of killing sprees and lynchings and spectacular performances of torture to assuage slave

157

rebellion.183 This narrative of criminalization also introduces the initial dialectic of master and slave, yoking mastery with whiteness and blackness with captivity, while concomitantly, and paradoxically, juxtaposing it vis-à-vis Bom-Crioulo’s mastery of Aleixo. By equally placing slavery and land in direct dialectic with sea and naval discipline, Caminha interrogates the notion of space in the articulation of black subjectivity. Like Azevedo, Caminha utilizes the black body to explore the notion of emancipation and its meaning both for the black body and the nation. This notion is evidenced in Caminha’s deployment of ship, land and body as concurrent (and often conflicting) metonyms for Brazil. Employing the naturalist framework, Caminha places physical and material space in concert with historical narrative to interrogate the notion of physical freedom and captivity duplicitously to one’s flesh, desire vis-àvis institution.184 To this end Caminha queries the true meaning of bodily freedom or emancipation when the same or equivalent oppressive power structures continue to exist, and new ones are recreated and fashioned upon the former? Within the context of the bourgeoning nation Caminha shows an exceeding preoccupation with the possibility, or impossibility of reforming slave bodies into national citizens. As such, he employs Bom-Crioulo’s body to explore historical continuity and examine the vicissitudes of post colonialism and slave abolition; through imprisonment and physical abjection he places the black body in disjuncture with and antithetical to the idea of citizenship. As both Bom-Crioulo’s enslavement and freedom are forcefully determined, defined by external

183

For more information regarding physical violence exacted against slaves during slavery and in the wake of abolition see Robert W. Thurston’s Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective . 184 I am suggesting that Caminha queries the notion of freedom within the purview of naturalist rhetoric. As Naturalism dictated that one was shaped by one’s environment, Caminha explores and constructs a world in which the body is both slave to external institution, in this case slavery and colonialism, and the internal captivity of one’s flesh and desire.

158

forces, and received without relative consciousness, Caminha further discloses the absence or limitations of black agency and self determination in the context of the nation. In this novel, Caminha purposefully employs Machadian duplicity, as Bom-Crioulo’s lot as former slave deliberately mirrors his lot as a second- class citizen aboard the ship. By exploring the position of second-class citizen within the context of the early twentieth century, Caminha intimates the limited or virtually nonexistent opportunities for black men and women in the incipient national workforce. This experience of slavery, Florestan Fernandes argues, posed a particular handicap to the Afro-Brazilians in two ways. First, it left a strong inheritance of racism, which made whites unwilling to accept black people as equals, or to grant them opportunities for full integration into Brazilian society after emancipation. Secondly, as most Afro-Brazilians would have been unable to take advantage of them because of the second aspect of the slave heritage: the ways in which slavery had crippled its victims intellectually, morally, socially, and economically (71).185 Bom-Crioulo’s non-place and lack of identity is further suggested by his displacement from Brazilian geography. Devoid of origins, he is said to have come from “God knows where.” His sole history or narrative is that of his escape. His personhood aboard the ship is further complicated by his re-naming: “Bom-Crioulo” or Good Nigger, purportedly a term of endearment in reward for his labor and physical strength. Again, working with duplicity, Caminha places the re-naming of slaves on Brazilian and American plantations vis-à-vis the renaming his aboard the ship. This re-naming further erases his personhood by rendering him a racialized subject, consuming his body in the very paradox that name suggests.

185

Fernandes, Florestan. The Negro in Brazilian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

159

Bom-Crioulo-Aleixo-Carolina Upon Bom-Crioulo’s transference, Aleixo falls prey to Carolina’s web of seduction, and is subsequently consumed, dominated, and enslaved by her sexual whims. Although many scholars have read Aleixo’s relationship with Carolina to signify Aleixo’s desire to articulate or instate (a) heteronormative sexuality,186 I would suggest that such a distinction cannot be so easily established. Rather, I would insert their liaison in Caminha’s recurrent homosexual tropology. Carolina emerges not merely as an over-sexed, lecherous, middle-aged woman, but as an allegorical and symbolic vestige of Portuguese colonialism, that as Miguel Vale de Almeida has adroitly noted “colonizes in bed:”187

Ora o meu pimpolho! Ora o rico pimpolhozinho!E ria, ria num desespero.Aleixo encavacou: Está bom, vou-me embora. Oh! não, não... Brincadeira! Se vais, fico zangada. Vê lá, hein! vê lá... E com fingida ternura, ameigando a voz: Fica, meu bonitinho, fica, junto à tua negra...Ele sorriu vagamente e entraram a conversar como bons amigos.... Falaram em Bom-Crioulo e riram à custa do negro, baixinho, à socapa...Ela, como se sentisse no próprio corpo as ferroadas daquele olhar, como se lhe experimentas e o calor vivo, a força magnética, o poder físico, material e irresistível, chegou-se ao grumete e disse-lhe ao ouvido estas palavras, que produzira, nele o efeito indizível e vago de um estremecimento nervoso: — Vamos tomar banho?...Aleixo não disse que sim nem que não. Quis ela mesma despir o rapaz, tirar-lhe a camisa de meia, tirar-lhe as calças, pô-lo nu a seus olhos. Bom-Crioulo já lhe havia dito que Aleixo “tinha formas de mulher”. Depois começou a se despir também...O tanque estava cheio a transbordar. Via-se-lhe o fundo claro através da água límpida e fresca. Ninguém os via naquela nudez primitiva, frente a frente – o corpo largo e mole da portuguesa em contraste com as formas ideais e rijas do efebo –, escandalosamente nus, pecadoramente bíblicos no silêncio do quintalejo ao abrigo do sol que vibrava em torno do pequeno alpendre a sua luz de ouro fulvo!O que eles fizeram, antes e depois do banho, ninguém saberá nunca. Os muros do quintal abafaram toda essa misteriosa cena de erotismo consumada ali por trás da Rua da Misericórdia num belíssimo dia de novembro. D. Carolina realizara, enfim, o seu desejo, a sua ambição de mulher gasta: possuir um amante novo, mocinho, imberbe, com uma ponta de ingenuidade a ruborizar-lhe a face, um amante quase ideal, que fosse para ela o que um animal de 186

See José Ricardo Chaves’ Bom-Crioulo de Adolfo Caminha: un texto fundacional de la literatura gay brasileña(2010); Leonardo Pinto Mendes’ O retrato do Imperiador: negociação e sexualidade no romance naturalista brasileiro(2000) and Robert Howes’ Race and Transgressive Sexuality in Adolfo Caminha's "BomCrioulo ( 2001). 187 See Miguel Vale de Almeida’s Not quite white”: Portuguese people in the margins of Lusotropicalism, the lusoAfro-Brazilian Space, and Lusophony.

160

estima é para o seu dono – leal, sincero, dedicado até ao sacrifício. Aleixo remoçava-a como um elixir estranho, milagrosamente afrodisíaco. Sentia-se outra depois que se metera com o pequerrucho: retesavam-se-lhe os nervos, abria-se-lhe o apetite, entrava-lhe n’alma uma extraordinária alegria de noiva em plena lua-de-mel, toda ela vibrava numa festiva exuberância de vida, numa eclosão torrencial de felicidade – o corpo leve, o espírito calmo... Aleixo pertencia-lhe, enfim; era seu, completamente seu; ela o tinha agora preso como um belo pássaro que se deixasse engaiolar; tinha-lhe ensinado segredinho de amor, e ele gostara imenso, e jurara nunca mais abandoná-la, nunca mais! Havia no rosto imberbe e liso do grumete uns tons fugitivos de ternura virginal, o quer que era breve e delicado, a branca melancolia de certas flores, o recolhimento ingênuo e discreto de uma educanda; e era isso justamente, esse quê indefinível, essa poesia inocente derramada no semblante de Aleixo, que provocava a portuguesa, ferindo a corda sensível do seu coração abandonado e gasto. Era uma pena, decerto, ver aquele rosto de mulher, aquelas formas de mulher, aquela estatuazinha de mármore, entregue às mãos grosseiras de um marinheiro, de um negro... Muita vez o pequeno fora seduzido, arrastado. Ela até fazia um benefício, uma obra de caridade... Aquilo com o outro, afinal, era uma grossa patifaria, uma bandalheira, um pecado, um crime! Se Aleixo havia de se desgraçar nas unhas do negro, era melhor que ela, uma mulher, o salvasse. Lucravam ambos, ele e ela...Mas Aleixo não podia esquecer BomCrioulo. A figura do negro acompanhava-o a toda parte, a bordo e em terra, quer ele quisesse quer não, com uma insistência de remorso. Desejava odiá-lo sinceramente, positivamente, esquecê-lo para sempre, varrê-lo da imaginação como a um pensamento mau, como a uma obsessão insólita e enervante; mas, debalde! O aspecto repreensivo do marinheiro estava gravado em seu espírito indelevelmente; a cada instante lembrava-se da musculatura rija de Bom-Crioulo, de seu gênio rancoroso e vingativo, de sua natureza extraordinária – híbrido conjunto de malvadez e tolerância –, de seus arrebatamentos, de sua tendência para o crime, e tudo isso, todas essas recordações o acovardavam, punhamlhe no sangue um calafrio de terror, um vago estremecimento de medo, qualquer cousa latente e aflitiva... Suas expansões com a portuguesa eram incompletas, vibravam-lhe os lábios em sorrisos de falsário, cada vez que ela o exaltava para deprimir o outro... Todavia a noite foi como um delírio de gozo e sensualidade. D. Carolina cevou o seu hermafroditismo agudo com beijos e abraços e sucções violentas...(47-48) [That’s my rose bud my itty bitty rose bud and she laughed and laughed as if possessed. Aleixo grew annoyed: “all right, I’m going.” Oh no don’t its only a joke if you leave I’ll be angry. Yes, I will yes, I will. And she put on an air of tenderness, softening her voice: “stay my itty bitty pretty boy, stay here with your old gal, he smiled faintly and then started chatting again, and like good friends…they talked about Bom-Crioulo and laughed hypocritically at the black man, in low voices… And, as if she felt the sting of that gaze in her own body, as if she felt its living heat, its magnetic force, its physical, material, irresistible power, she went up to the cabin boy and murmured in his ear, producing in him the vague, indefinable effect of a nervous shock: “ Let’s take a bath..… Aleixo didn’t accept or refuse…She insisted on undressing the boy herself, taking off his knit shirt, taking off his trousers, stripping him in her sight. Bom-Crioulo had already told her that Aleixo had a woman’s body…no one saw them in that primitive nakedness, face to face the soft, ample body of the Portuguese woman contrasting with the lean, muscular beauty of adolescence- scandalously nude, sinfully biblical, in the silence of a little yard, hidden 161

away from the sun which scattered its tiny golden light around the small porch that shielded them!... Miz Carolina had finally had her wish fulfilled, the wish of a worn-out woman- to have a boyish, beardless youth as her lover… Aleixo belonged to her at last; he was wholly hers. She had him trapped now like a beautiful bird which has let itself be caged…it was really a pity, she thought, to see that feminine face that woman’s body, that little marble statue, given over to the rough paws of a sailor, a black man. Probably the lad had been seduced, had been forced into the role. She actually was doing him good; it was an act of charity. What he was doing with the negro was villainy; after all, it was an abomination, a sin, a man, a crime! If Aleixo was going to be ruined at the hands of a black man, it was better that a woman, like her, should try to save him. Both of them would profit from it, both he and she…but Aleixo couldn’t forget Bom-Crioulo. Aboard and ashore whether he wanted it to or not, with insistence remorse… the reproving, rebuking aspect of the sailor was indelibly imprinted on his mind: he constantly remembered Bom-Crioulo’s hard, ripping muscles, his vengeful, unforgiving nature, his extraordinary temperament – a strange hybrid of tendencies, and all this, all these memories, frightened him, made his blood run cold with fear, with a vague shiver of panic, something latent, something landlady was incomplete; his lips trebled with the smile of someone bearing false-witness, every time she praised him in order to heap abuse on the black man. All that night was a frenzy of pleasure and sensuality. Miz Carolina gave full vent to her pronounced hermaphroditic tendencies, with kissed, embraces and violent suctions.] (104-107)

In Carolina’s seduction of Aleixo, the most salient element, as evidenced in his sexual encounters with Bom-Crioulo, is his unarticulated consent and desire. The text says “he did not accept or refuse,” he again is seemingly sexually coerced, and the identical vexed power dynamic is duplicated. The narrative voice foregrounds a disclosure of Carolina’s intent and purposefully frames the encounter as she makes clear reference to ownership and refers to him as being like an animal in relation to its owner. Sex with Carolina, as with Bom-Crioulo, is not free/ ing or pleasurable, but endued with bondage, domination and alien pleasure.188Caminha intentionally juxtaposes this scene as a direct mirroring of Bom-Crioulo and Aleixo’s “auction block” scene. In this instance, however, Aleixo does not feel ashamed or objectified. This could potentially be attributed to an alluded racial prejudice that is sprinkled throughout the text.

188

By alien pleasure I am suggesting the “pleasure” within the narrative is not mutually constitutive; as yet pleasure in these encounters is intrinsically linked to the dominator/ oppressor.

162

In Bom-Crioulo, national identity and national character are inherently linked to and articulated through sexual identity. The two are presented as both mutually informing and mutually constitutive. Caminha constructs Aleixo’s ambivalent sexuality as a textual embodiment of turn-of-the-century Brazil—a vulnerable ideal caught in the interstices of the not so former colonial and slave past. To illustrate this struggle Caminha foregrounds what can be defined as “corporal dialectal antagonism” between the characters. There is the constant: young versus old, strong versus weak, vitality versus decadence, freedom versus captivity. Carolina is described as a “worn and decadent woman” in direct contrast with Aleixo’s “beardless youth.” Throughout the narrative both Carolina and Bom-Crioulo’s bodies are presented as outsiders, both nationally and socially, and are more importantly described as not Brazilian. Aleixo, curiously, is the only character whose national roots or physical relationship to Brazilian geography is concretely established. Carolina is repeatedly referenced as Portuguese, whereas Bom-Crioulo’s sole connection to Brazil is not geographical, but established by how body it is used in service to the Brazilian nation. Allegorically, Carolina as imperial body, through her seduction and prima facie molestation, underscores Caminha’s pronounced nationalist disquiet in the wake of post colonial Brazil. At this critical juncture Caminha envisaged the specter of Portuguese colonialism as a material threat to the articulation of Brazil’s incipient national identity. To this end, the material specter of slavery and colonialism resolutely blurs the narrative timeline to establish continuity, to such an extent that historical time cannot be entirely discerned or concretely resolved.189

189

Adolfo’s irreverent depiction of the Portuguese can be read as as part of a strand of period Lusophobia. For a cogent account of Lusophobia in the 19th century romance see Nelson H. Vieira’s Brasil e Portugal: A Imagem Recíproca.

163

In this scene, using the historical interconnectedness between these narrative bodies, Caminha dramatizes sexual deviance and desire by exploring yet another intimate and familiar perversion: incest. Carolina at once presented as a maternal figure, subsequently renders herself as putative sexual partner. Bom-Crioulo, who could ostensibly be regarded as a sort of paternal figure haunts the sexual encounter, purposefully drawing all three personages together in a vexed incestuous and historical communion. This outwardly heterosexual encounter also becomes homosexual, as a closer examination of this scene will reveal the intentional absence of phallic penetration. 190 The sequence culminates with Carolina ardently giving in to her pronounced “hermaphroditic tendencies,” and Aleixo is again rendered and sexualized in the feminine, so that Carolina might assert herself as master and dominator. The absence or non-presence of Aleixo’s phallus in this scene, as conduit of sexual pleasure and gender locality, is evidenced in the absence of his material physical pleasure, as his non-sexuality is rendered through the phallocentristic mastery of his body. In this sense, what I am suggesting is that one’s sexual identity, and ostensibly identity is determined by one’s relation to or distance from the phallus. To repudiate the phallus is to exist for the jouissance of the other. As we saw in chapter two, the notion of pleasure, material or political is intrinsically linked to privilege and the exercise of autonomy. Within the imperatives of patriarchal institution, the phallus is both the conduit of authority and pleasure. Accordingly,

190

Here it might be useful to recall Joan Dayan’s claim in Haiti, History and the Gods (1995) that "being a master or mistress became so addictive a pleasure that the slave as ultimate possession became a necessary part of the master's or mistress's identity.” (Dayan 127).

164

in Bom-Crioulo we only bear witness to the material presence or manifestation of jouissance in the possessor or performer of the phallus. In essence, we might consider that under the behest of patriarchy, the female body, or the feminine is the primal abject. All articulations or locutions of domination must be rendered through the idea of the female body, and a projected conception of the feminine. This is evidenced in both Carolina and Bom-Crioulo’s sexual trysts in which we witness the conflation of sexual domination and the compulsory fashioning or creation of femaleness. As such, the absence of Aleixo’s articulated desire avows the projection and transference of gender, and cogently evinces that pleasure and phallocentrism work in tandem as tacit bedfellows. By placing same sex desire at the center of this galled love triangle Caminha shows us the intrinsic narcissism of desire, in which the object is perpetually invested with the constructed narrative of the inscriber. The object is always a terrain of inscription and ultimate consequence of the self and desire proper. It might then be considered that sexual desire in a sense is always homo, in that the object and the desire are but mere reflections of the self in concert. The Other, inevitably, is the interstice through which the self is reified and articulated. In the end, this vicious cycle of bodily exchanges and broken covenants, ends in veritable naturalist fashion. Bom-Crioulo, sick, frail and a mere shell of the man he once was, learns of Aleixo’s betrayal and sets out to decide his fate, violently exacting his revenge: Aleixo ia saindo porta fora, tranqüilamente, apertado na sua roupa azul e branca de marinheiro, a camisa decotada, a calça justa. O negro teve um daqueles ímpetos medonhos, que o acometiam às vezes; garganteou um — oh! rouco, abafado, comprimido, e, ligeiro, furioso, perdido de cólera, em dar tempo a nada, precipitou-se, numa vertigem de seta, para a rua. Não via nada, tresvariado, como se de repente lhe houvesse fugido a luz dos olhos e a razão do cérebro. Precipitou-se, e, esbarrando com o grumete, fintou-o pelo braço. Tremia numa crise formidável de desespero, os olhos congestionados, um suor frio a porejar-lhe da testa negra e reluzente. O pequeno estacou surpreendido: Sou eu mesmo, rugiu Bom165

Crioulo, sou eu mesmo! Pensavas que era só meter-te com a portuguesa, hein? Olha para esta cara, olha como estou magro, como estou acabado... Olha, olha! E apertava bruscamente o outro, sacudindo-lhe como se o quisesse atirar no chão.Vê lá se me conheces, anda! Olha bem para esta cara! O efebo debatia-se, pálido, aterrado: Me largue! Não me provoque, senão eu grito! Anda pr’aí, grita, se és capaz! Grita, safado, semvergonha... mal-agradecido! Sua voz tomava uma inflexão voluptuosa e terrível ao mesmo tempo; a palavra saía-lhe gaguejada, estuporada e trêmula.Grita, anda! O outro mudava de cores, recuava trôpego, a língua presa, quase a chorar, numa aflição de culpado, o olhar azul submisso refletindo a imagem do negro: Me largue, repetiu. Eu lhe peço: me largue!Transeuntes olhavam-nos de banda e voltavam-se para os ver naquela posição, rosto a rosto, juntinhos, agarrados misteriosamente. Porque Bom-Crioulo não falava alto, que todos ouvissem, não dava escândalo, não fazia alarme: sua voz era um rugido cavernoso e histérico, um regougo abafado. longínquo e profundo. Alguma cousa extraordinária tinha havido porque, de repente, o povo recuou, abrindo passagem, num atropelo. E D. Carolina também chegara à janela com a vozeria, com o barulho, viu, entre duas filas de curiosos, o grumete ensangüentado... Aleixo passava nos braços de dois marinheiros, levado como um fardo, o corpo mole, a cabeça pendida para trás, roxo, os olhos imóveis, a boca entreaberta. O azul-escuro da camisa e a calça branca tinha grandes nódoas vermelhas. O pescoço estava envolvido num chumaço de panos. Os braços caiamlhe, sem vida, inertes, bambos, numa frouxidão de membros mutilados. A rua enchia-se de gente pelas janelas, pelas portas, pelas calçadas. Era uma curiosidade tumultuosa e flagrante a saltar dos olhos, um desejo irresistível de ver, uma irresistível atração, uma ânsia! Ninguém se importava com o “o outro”, com o negro, que lá ia, rua abaixo, triste e desolado, entre as baionetas, à luz quente da manhã: todos, porém, queriam “ver o cadáver”, analisar o ferimento, meter o nariz na chaga...Mas, um carro rodou, todo lúgubre, todo fechado, e a onda dos curiosos foi se espalhando, se espalhando, té cair tudo na monotonia habitual, no eterno vaivém. (119-120) [Aleixo was coming out the door, calmly, in his tight-fitting white-and-blue sailor’s uniform, with his shirt unbuttoned at the neck and his trousers fitting him exactly right…”Yes it’s me,” roared Bom-Crioulo. “It’s me in person! You thought it was going to be easy to take up with that Portuguese woman, didn’t you? Look at this face of mine, look at how thin I am, look at what a wreck I am. Look, look!” And he squeezed the boy roughly, shaking him as if he wanted to knock him down. “Let me go” he cried. “Don’t do anything to me or I’ll shout!” “Go ahead then shout if you can! Shout, you miserable scum, you brazen pup, you ungrateful cur!” His voice took on a tone which was both caressing and terrible at the same time; his words came out in an apoplectic, tremulous stammer “go on, shout” the boys faced turned red and then pale, he drew back stumblingly, unable to say a word, almost crying, guilt-smitten, his submissive blue eyes reflecting the image of the black man. “Let me go!” he repeated. “I beg you, let me go!”… the black man’s eyes were red and they had a fierce; embittered expression in them … something extraordinary happened, because, suddenly the crowd drew back and opened up, in a confused rush…Miz Carolina, who had also been drawn to the window by the noise and the voices, saw the cabin-boy lying, bathed in blood, between two ranks of onlookers… Aleixo was being removed now by two seamen, who carried him like a bale of goods. His complexion was 166

purplish, his body hung slack, his head dangled backwards, his eyes stared fixedly, and his mouth was half open. His dark blue shirt and his white swaddled in cloth. His arms hung down inert, loose, lifeless, with the laxness of limbs that have been mutilated. The street was filling up with people at windows, in doorways, on the sidewalks. It was a disorderly, patently obvious curiously, an irresistible desire to see, an irresistible attraction a need! Nobody paid any attention to the combatant, to the black man, who was being marched down the street now, sad and grief-stricken, between two rows of pointed bayonets, in the hot light of morning: everyone wanted to see the body to analyse the scar, to stick their nose in the wound. But, a hearse rolled away, sealed and gloomy, and the crowd of onlookers scattered, scattered, until everything had returned to the customary monotony, to the eternal coming and going of passers-by.] (139-141)

Aleixo, the green opportunist, becomes ensnared in competing interests (including his own), and a vicious interplay of sex, slavery and colonialism, and ultimately succumbs to it. Aleixo’s fate, perhaps, represents the author’s, (as we have seen with the Azevedo brothers) abounding pessimism regarding the state and future of the Brazilian nation. Caminha’s concern is an identity crisis promulgated by Brazil’s failure to reconcile the material consequences of slave emancipation and the end of Portuguese colonialism. It is no secret that national post-abolition projects did not seek to incorporate the black slave. Instead, Brazil after abolition sought to forget and erase slavery from national memory. Period intellectuals and writers such as Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto through their writing challenged the erasure of slavery and the black body from national and political consciousness. Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo too maintains that the incipient Brazilian nation could not be formed by disavowing the very institutions and bodies that had framed its identity. As so much of identity is tied into what we do with our bodies and historically what has been done to them, the sexual in Bom-Crioulo interrogates the subject relationship to power and serves as the terrain at which individual desire and the imperatives of nation-building coalesce. 167

In this closing scene Caminha spectacularizes Aleixos’s death. The on-lookers do not run to save him; rather, they profess a yearning to see his wounds, his disfigured body—rendering an almost pornographic pleasure. The scene seemingly unites people from all stations of society to take pleasure in the spectacle of anonymous violence. Though the ending of the text suggests a certain motion or build-up, Caminha ends the scene and the novel in the “eterno vaivém”. This “eternal coming and going of passers-by,” I would argue, works duplicitously. Caminha, again, juxtaposes the motion and buildup of the text in direct dialectical juxtaposition with the semblance of the conscious motion or movement of the spectator to see the spectacle. Afterwards, Caminha discloses the emptiness of this motion, as the on-lookers “se espalham” or scurry, not directed toward any particular direction or purpose, but to “customary monotony.” More importantly, this semblance connotes an inherent stagnancy and digression in the face of life-altering change. Digression, complacency and stagnancy coalesce in the spectator’s tandem interest in the spectacle and the consequence. The consequence however, is emptily consumed and the pained subjects are displaced and not committed to consciousness. Ultimately, what is essential to underscore is that the spectators, unlike the victims, leave the spectacle unchanged, hearts unmoved and ever complacent. Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo cogently demonstrates that the nation building project cannot be conceived or imagined through a negation of the very bodies, histories, and institutions that formed it. In the end, Caminha shows us that a nation built on evasion, erasure, and disremembrance will inevitably end in destruction.

168

Conclusion Toward an ambivalent conclusion… As I sit here to write a conclusion to this dissertation, exactly one hundred and twenty four years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, I do so ambivalently. When faced with the task of composing a conclusion to this discussion, I am forced to question the finite implications of the word: for I am convinced that the bodies that occupy this text serve to redimensionalize our understanding of race, sex and nation building. The authors I have discussed in this thesis all “culminate” in the horror of moments of tragedy unresolved, leaving the reader to imagine a future, a consequence to unfold. As I sit here, my ambivalence, as Adolfo Caminha, Aluísio Azevedo, Artur Azevedo and Urbano Duarte to “tie up loose ends” stems from the question of its possibility. In the preceding pages I have attempted to explore the black male body’s absence from national mythology and more precisely what the anxiety surrounding reverse interracial intimacies might disclose in the wake of Brazilian independence and abolition. The convergence of these two events brought to the fore the meaning, definition and anxieties of freedom in the narrative we might very well call Brazilian. At the heart of what I have delineated as “reverse miscegenation anxieties,” (sex between black men and white partners) abides not a question of biology or skin color, but anxieties surrounding the concretization of mythology surrounding bodies. This dissertation is not merely about interracial sex, but what its presence as an action in concert and in dissent might suggest or disclose in the creation of national narrative. 169

I have focused on interracial intimacies in this dissertation not merely to examine black and white bodies engaged in the act of sex, but to underscore that the physical, the somatic, has always been inscribed with political resonance. Indeed the nation is built upon the discourses that we make about it, as well as those bodies who become subjectivities. The violence abounds in the simultaneity of their convergence. Desire is not merely a question of lack or longing, a want or a need, but imbued with questions of representation. This political resonance is the very fundament of the racialized nation— built upon monstrous intimacies, the ruses of pleasure, the realization of desire, and its very abnegation. These sordid intimacies, the black female body’s narrative of sexual domination, her embedded presence in the production of white male political desire, served as the very specter of the negation of the black male body. I have argued that reverse miscegenation unsettles precisely because of its possibility for the creation of counter narrative or dissident narrations. Sex becomes the site of the collision of narratives, as in the racialized nation the construction of national mythology is always physical, and always in tandem with the construction of racial mythology. Institutions change. What persists beyond the 19th century is their unrelenting hold on cultural perception, and the very ways in which we come to discern, name, and narrate difference. Desire does not die in the hands of institution, but provides new economies of knowing and understanding. The myth or mythology constructed upon or through the body are indeed the most obstinate, as the sustenance of racialized mythologies foments a dialectic of regeneration, in which the regeneration of bodies (re)produces the visibility and perdurability of myth. The common places, stereotypes, do not cease in the face of institution, but foreground new modalities of representation steeped in the vicissitudes of the former and hold present day consequences for the bodies at the center of these texts. 170

As I suggested in the introduction, the black female body in the universe of slavery comes to stand in as the collective racial body, and that black male subjectivity is articulated as a direct consequence of the black female body’s position as sexualized subject. It is imperative to underscore that the violation of black women was not solely a means of repudiating black men’s position as patriarch, husband, or sexual partner, but as means of collectively abnegating black desire. In the discourse of slavery, black slaves were not human beings, but rendered objects of pleasure, blame, and justification. Human beings possess a gender, human beings consent, human beings belong, human beings suffer. The individual rape, the singular lynching or murder of a black body served in the capacity of physically and collectively disavowing blackness. As the sexual is an outward expression of desire, slavery systemically subsumed and disallowed black sexuality as a means of repudiating and concretizing the impossibility of black desire and personhood. Slavery’s dissident desires, vexed intimacies superseded or transcended the purview of gender to foreground a narrative of black negation. For Afro-Brazilian women and men, it is realizing, reimagining, and disarticulating the nature of dissident desire inherent to national narrative that possibility for counter narrative is conceived. Black desire, and by extension black political desire, lies in the subversion, the countering of a mythology in which pleasure is political, and serves as the very fundament of subjugation. This counter-discourse is the recovery of the violated black body from the illusory inclusion of nationality. It is in the recovery of the black body’s history in its singularity and plenitude, its narrative in concert and in disjuncture with that of the nation that voices of opposition have emerged—divesting the collective black body from national and historical economies of

171

exploitation, and from the insidious imperatives of silence. Ultimately, from silence, absence, erasure to resistance the black body in Brazilian literature beseeches us to resist the fallacy that the body is merely flesh that power, history and desire can violate, but a voice, a narrative, a history in dissent.

172

Bibliography Akbar, Naim. Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery. Jersey City, N.J.: New Mind Productions, 1984. Aldrich, Robert F. Colonialism and Homosexuality. London; New York: Routledge, 2003. Alencar, José Martiniano de. Cartas a favor da escravidão / Alencar ; organização, Tâmis Parron. São Paulo: Hedra, 2008. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Almeida, Miguel Vale de. An Earth-Colored Sea:"Race", Culture, and the Politics of Identity in the Postcolonial Portuguese-Speaking World. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. ---. The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town. 4 Vol. Providence, RI; Oxford England: Berghahn Books, 1996. ---.. “Not quite white”: Portuguese people in the margins of Lusotropicalism, the luso-AfroBrazilian Space, and Lusophony.2008. Unpublished manuscript. Bender, J. Gerald. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, Univ. of California, 1978. Bush, Barbara. “The Woman Slave and the Slave Resistance.” Slave Women in the Caribbean Society, 1650 – 1838. Indiana University Press, 1990. Castro Alves, Antonio de. Obras Completas de Castro Alves. São Paulo.Companhia editora nacional, 1942. Alves, Miriam, and Maria Helena Lima. Women Righting :Afro-Brazilian Women's Short Fiction - Mulheres Escre-Vendo : Uma Antologia bilingüe De Escritoras Afro-Brasileiras contemporaneas. Bilingual ed. London: Mango Pub., 2005. Andrews, George Reid. Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Appiah, Anthony, Amy Gutmann, and David B. Wilkins. Color Conscious - the Political Morality of Race. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. . Armintor, Marshall Needleman. Lacan and the Ghosts of Modernity: Masculinity, Tradition, and the Anxiety of Influence. 20 Vol. New York: P. Lang, 2004. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. 173

Asante, Molefi K. Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003. Associação Brasileira de Estudos da Homocultura. Congresso, and Denilson Lopes. Imagem & Diversidade Sexual :Estudos Da Homocultura. 1st ed. São Paulo: Nojosa, 2004. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience .Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. Augusto Herculano Lassance. Dissertação sobre a Prostitição, em particular em relação à cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Thesis ( Doutorado em Medicina, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, 1872. Azevedo, Aluísio. O Mulato. São Paulo: Ática, 1977. ---.Mulato;translated by Murray Graeme MacNicoll. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Azevedo, Arthur. Teatro de Arthur Azevedo. Rio de Janeiro : Instituto Nacional de Artes Cênicas, 1983. Azevedo, Sânzio de. Adolfo Caminha: Vida e Obra . Fortaleza, Brasil: UFC, Casa de José de Alencar, Programa Editorial, 1997. Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not seen. 1st ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. ---. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell, 1964; 1963. Barreca, Regina. Desire and Imagination: Classic Essays in Sexuality. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Meridian, 1995. Bataille, Georges. Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. Salem, NH: Ayer Co., 1984; 1962. Beattie, Peter M. The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil. Wilmington, Del: SR Books, 2004. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity, New York,NY: Citadel Press, 1976. ---. The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Bell, Linda A., and David Blumenfeld. Overcoming Racism and Sexism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. Bellini, Ligia. A Coisa Obscura :Mulher, Sodomia e Inquisição no Brasil Colonial. 1st ed. São Paulo, SP: Editora Brasiliense, 1989.

174

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Bennett, Michael, and Vanessa D. Dickerson. Recovering the Black Female Body: SelfRepresentations by African American Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Bergson, Henri, and Sidney Littman. The Introduction to a New Philosophy. Boston: J. W. Luce and Company, 1912. Berlant, Lauren. National Brands/ National Body: Imitation of Life. In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and the Modern Text, ed. Hortense J.Spillers. New York: Routeledge, 1991. Bernasconi, Robert, and Tommy Lee Lott. The Idea of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co. 2000. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 2004; 1994. ---. Nation and Narration. London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Bieber, Judy. Plantation Societies in the Era of European Expansion. 18 Vol. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1997. Bignall, Simone, and Paul Patton. Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Bocayuva, Helena. Erotismo À Brasileira, o, Excesso Sexual na Obra de Gilberto Freyre. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2001. Bomfim, Manoel José do. A América Latina : Males de Origem. Rio de Janeiro, RJ : TOPBOOKS. Bosi, Alfredo. Dialética da Colonização. São Paulo, SP: Companhia das Letras, 1992. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. Brayner, Sónia. A Metáfora do Corpo no Romance Naturalista;Estudo Sobre "O cortiço." Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1973. Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 18501910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Brookshaw, David. Race and Color in Brazilian Literature. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. 175

Brower, Keith H., Earl E. Fitz, and Enrique E. Martinez-Vidal. Jorge Amado :New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2001. Burlamaqui Leopoldo Cesar. Mémoria Analýtica acerca do commércio d’escravos e acerca da escravidão doméstica.Rio da Janeiro,1837. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. ---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Kim D. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post- Abolition, São Paulo and Salvador. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Candido, Antônio. O Discurso e a Cidade. 3a ed. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 2004. Caldwell, Kia Lilly. Negras in Brazil: Re-Envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Calle-Gruber, Mireille. On the Feminine. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996. Caminha, Adolfo. Bom-Crioulo. 2 Vol. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Artium, 1997. ---. Bom-Crioulo : the Black man and the cabin boy; translated from Portuguese by E.A. Lacey. San Francisco : Gay Sunshine Press, 1982. ---. Cartas Literarárias. Fortaleza : UFC Edições, 1999. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Carlson, Cindy L., Robert L. Mazzola, and Susan M. Bernardo. Gender Reconstructions: Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture. Aldershot, Hants; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Chapman, Mary, and Glenn Hendler. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999. Cixous, Hélène. The Portable Cixous / edited by Marta Segarra. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Clifford, James. On Ethnographic Allegory in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

176

Cohen, Cathy J. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Black Women’s Love Relationships”. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York/ London: Routledge, 2009. Cordeiro, João Mendonça. O Mulato, 1881-1981 :Cem Anos De Um Romance revolucionário. 1 Vol. São Luís-Ma.: Universidade Federal do Maranhão, 1987. Crawford, Margo Natalie. Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Davis, Angela Y. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. Seven Stories Press 1 ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. Day, Gary, and Clive Bloom. Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press.1995. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Debret, Baptiste- Jean, Negra tatuada vendendo caju, 1827 . ---. Carregadores de Caixas de Açúcar, 1834-1839. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1996. Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. De La Grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967. Dixie, Quinton Hosford, Cornel West, and James Melvin Washington. The Courage to Hope :From Black Suffering to Human Redemption. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. D’Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd.ed Chicago. University of Chicago Press.1997. Donald, James, and Ali Rattansi. "Race", Culture, and Difference. London; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications in association with the Open University, 1992. Donley, Carol C., Sheryl Buckley, and Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays. The Tyranny of the Normal: An Anthology. 2 Vol. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.

177

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2e. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 2004. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Negro. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization Ltd, 1974; 1915. ---. Worlds of Color. book 3 Vol. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1976. ---. The Souls of Black Folk; introduction by David Levering Lewis, New York: Modern Library, 2003. Dunning, Stefanie K. Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Evaristo, Conceição. Recordar é preciso. Unpublished manuscript. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fernandes, Florestan. The Negro in Brazilian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Figari, Carlos. @s "outr@s" Cariocas :Interpelações, experiências e Identidades homoeróticas no Rio De Janeiro : Séculos XVII Ao XX. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2007. Web. 2 May 2011. . Foster, William Henry. Gender, Mastery and Slavery: From European to Atlantic World Frontiers. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ---. ‘The subject and power' in Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Vol three. Edited by James Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press.Original article published 1982. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro- American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987; 1971. Freud, Sigmund: SE XIX, 1923. Freud, Sigmund 1940a: SE XXIII, 201. Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-Grande & Senzala.Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro, 1998.

178

---.The Masters and the Slaves .Casa-Grande & Senzala: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. 2d English language, rev ed. New York: Knopf, 1968; 1956. ---. O Escravo Nos anúncios De Jornais Brasileiros do século XIX. Recife, Brasil: Imprensa Universitária, 1963. Fundação Carlos Chagas, São Paulo, and São Paulo. Nossos Corpos. São Paulo, Brasil: Prefeitura do Municipio de São Paulo, 1990. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Gagnon, John H., and William Simon. Sexual Conduct; the Social Sources of Human Sexuality. Chicago: Aldine Pub.Co, 1973. Garber, Marjorie B., Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Media Spectacles. New York: Routledge, 1993. Gates, Henry Louis, and Cornel West. The Future of the Race. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. GenderStudies.NL. Web. 10 Nov.2011.. Giddings, Paula. Burning all Illusions: Writings from the Nation on Race, 1866-2002. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. ---. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1st ed. New York: W. Morrow, 1984. Gill, Carolyn Bailey. Time and the Image. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ---. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. ---. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Golding, Sue. The Eight Technologies of Otherness. London; New York: Routledge, 1997.

179

Gomes, Heloisa Toller. O Negro e o Romantismo Brasileiro. São Paulo, SP: Atual Editora, 1988. Gordon, Richard A. Confessing Sodomy, Accusing a Master: The Lisbon Trial of Pernambuco’s Luiz da Costa. In Afro- Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Edited by Kathyrn Joy McKnight and Leo J. GaraFalo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.2009. Gould, Stephen Jay. The flamingo’s Smile: Reflection in Natural History New York: Norton Press, 1985. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. “The Body Politic: Black Female Sexuality and the Nineteenth Century Euro-American Imagination”. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in the American Culture. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (ed.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. Haberly, David T. Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ---. Abolitionism in Brazil: Anti-Slavery and Anti Slave, in Luso Brazilian Review, 9 (2): 30-46, 1972. Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990. Hanchard, Micheal. Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Harris, Herbert W., Howard C. Blue, and Ezra E. H. Griffith. Racial and Ethnic Identity: Psychological Development and Creative Expression. New York: Routledge, 1995. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life. 1 Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1990; 1987. Higgins, Kathleen J. "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth- Century Society, Minas Gerais. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Hill Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Hodes,Martha,Elizabeth. White women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

180

Holland Patricia Sharon. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham. NC. Duke University Press, 2000. hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. ---. Black looks. Race and representation. Boston: South End Press: 1992. ---. Black Women Intellectuals. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Cornel West and bell hooks (eds.). Boston: South End Press, 1991. ---. Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. New York, NY: Atria Books, 2003. ---. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2004. ---. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990. Hopkinson, Natalie, and Natalie Y. Moore. Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation. 1st ed. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2006. Howes, Robert. Race and Transgressive Sexuality in Adolfo Caminha's "Bom-Crioulo. in Luso-Brazilian Review, 38 (1): 41-62, 2001. Hunter, Ian, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson. On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality, and Obscenity Law. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. Isfahani-Hammond, Alexandra. The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 1861. New York: Signet Classic, 2000. James, Joy, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. The Black Feminist Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. JanMohamed, Abdul. “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright and the Articulation of 'Racialized Sexuality.'" Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to Aids. Ed. Domna Stanton. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1992. Johnson, Charles. A Phenomenology of the Black Body. “Michigan Quarterly Review” 32(4).595, 1999. Johnson, Lyman L., and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

181

Johnston, Lynda, and Robyn Longhurst. Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Jones, Gayl. The Healing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1968. Kammeyer, Kenneth C. W. A Hypersexual Society: Sexual Discourse, Erotica, and Pornography in America Today. 1st ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Karasach, Mary. A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850, trans. Pedro Maia Soares São Paolo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. Kaup, Monika, and Debra J. Rosenthal. Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Kimmel, Michael S., and Rebecca Plante. Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray. Narcissus Transformed: The Textual Subject in Psychoanalysis and Literature. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. ---. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Lacan, Jacques, Juliet Mitchell, and Jacqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982. ---. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. ---.Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 1956 6-57. ---. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lane, Christopher. The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.B. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris : Quadrige/PUF, 1967. 182

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 1956 . Lauderdale Graham, Sandra. Caetana Says no: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lemelle, Anthony J. Black Male Deviance. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995. Lima Barreto, Maria Luisa Nunes, and Lima Barreto. Lima Barreto, Bibliography and Translations. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whitenes: How White People Profit from Identity politics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. López, Alfred J. Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Lorde, Audre, and Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984. Lucinda, Elisa. 50 Poemas escolhidos pelo autor. Rio de Janeiro, RJ : Edições Galo Branco, 2004. Macedo, Francisco Ferraz de. Da Prostuição e Gera, e em Particualar na cidade de Rio de Janiero: prophyaxia da syphlis. Thesis (Doutorado em Medicina, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, 1872. Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de. As Vitimas Algozes: quadros da escravidão. São Paulo: Editora Scipione, 1991. Mair, Lucille Marthurin. “The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies During Slavery”. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (eds.) Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2000. Marotti, Giorgio. Black Characters in the Brazilian Novel. 6 Vol. Los Angeles: Center for AfroAmerican Studies, University of California, 1987. McClintock, Anne, et al. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. 11 Vol. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Mendes,Leonardo Pinto. O retrato do Imperiador: negociação e sexualidade no romance naturalista brasileiro. Porto Alegre, Brasil: Edipucrs, 2000.

183

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews. London; New York: Routledge, 2000. Morgan, Jennifer. “’Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies,and the Gendering of Racial Ideology”. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Morris, Rosalind C., and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak? : Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1990 Vol. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. ---. Sula. New York, Knopf; [distributed by Random House] 1974. Mott, Luiz R. B. Escravidão, Homossexualidade e Demonologia. São Paulo, SP: Icone Editora, 1988. ---. O sexo prohibido: Virgins, gays e escravos nas garras da Inquisição. Campinas, Brazil: Pairus, 1988. Moura, Clóvis. O Negro, De Bom Escravo a Mau cidadão?. 21 Vol. Rio de Janeiro: Conquista, 1977. Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975. Muraro, Rose Marie. Sexualidade Da Mulher Brasileira :Corpo e Classe Social no Brazil. 4a ed. Petrópolis: Volzes, 1983. Nabuco, Joaquim, Izabel Andrade Marson, and Celio Ricardo Tasinafo. O Abolicionismo. Brasilia: Fundação Universidade de Brasília, 2003; 1883. Nascimento, Abdias do. Brazil, Mixture Or Massacre? : Essays in the Genocide of a Black People. 2nd ed. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm; Ansell-Pearson, Keith and Large, Duncan; The Nietzsche Reader Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Nye, Robert A. Sexuality. Oxford England; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Olinto, Heidrun Krieger, and Karl Erik Schullhammer. Literatura e Imagem. 8 Vol. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Editora Galo Branco, 2005. Oliveira, Emanuelle. Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro- Brazilian Literature. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007.

184

Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. ---. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. ---. Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting.Waco, Texas: Markham Press Fund, 1995. Parker, Andrew, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and English Institute. Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995. Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Rabassa, Gregory. O Negro Na ficção Brasileira; 4 Vol. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Tempo Brasileiro, 1965. Rago, Margareth. Os Prazeres Da Noite :Prostituição e códigos Da Sexualidade Feminina Em São Paulo, 1890-1930. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Paz e Terra, 1991. Read, Alan. The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, Institute of International Arts, 1996. Reichmann, Rebecca Lynn. Race in Contemporary Brazil: From Indifference to Inequality. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Ribeiro, Julio, et al. A Carne. 11th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 1996. Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania. 2 Vol. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Rose, Tricia. Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Ross. Marlon B. “Race, Rape, Castration”. Callaloo (Winter 2000): 290-312. Ruffato, Luiz. Entre Nós. Rio de Janeiro: Língua Geral, 2007.

185

Saint-Aubin Arthur Flannigan , Testeria: The Dis-ease of Black Men in White Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture, Callaloo (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press , 1994 ), 10541073. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 Sant'Anna, Affonso Romano de. O Canibalismo Amoroso :O Desejo e a interdição em nossa cultura através da poesia. São Paulo, Brasil: Brasiliense, 1984. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. "Entre Próspero e Caliban: colonialismo, pós-colonialismo e interidentidade," Novos Estudos Cebrap, (66). 2003. ---.Pela mão De Alice :O Social e o político Na pós- Modernidade. 8th ed. São Paulo: Cortez, 1995. Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1966, c1956. Sartwell, Crispin. Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Schreiber, Evelyn Jaffe. Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Schwartz, Stuart B. Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Schwarz, Roberto, and John Gledson. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London; New York: Verso, 1992. Searles, Patricia, and Ronald J. Berger. Rape and Society: Readings on the Problem of Sexual Assault. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York : Columbia University Press, 1985 ---. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 Segal, Lynne. Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

186

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. ---. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. ---. Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Sinfield, Alan. On Sexuality and Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Singer, Linda, Judith Butler, and Maureen MacGrogan. Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic. New York: Routledge, 1993. Skidmore, Thomas E. Brazil, Five Centuries of Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ---.Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. ---. História do Brasil. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1998. Sollors, Werner, and Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays. An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Sollors, Werner. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ---. Neither Black nor White Yet both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. ---. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ---. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. New York: Routledge, 1991. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: “Where Black Meets “Queer”. Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2006.

187

Strozier, Robert M. Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity: Historical Constructions of Subject and Self. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. Sullivan, Edward J. Brazil: Body and Soul. New York; London: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. ---. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Thurston, Robert W. Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Trouillot Rolph-Michel, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. Valente, Fernando Luiz. “Brazilian Literature and Citzenship: From Euclides da Cunha to Marcos Dias .in Luso- Brazilian Review, 38 (2):11-29, 2001. Vieira Nelson H. Brasil e Portugal: A Imagem Recíproca. Lisboa, Portugal. Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa,1991. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. ---. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Wilkerson, William S. Ambiguity and Sexuality: A Theory of Sexual Identity. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Woods, Jewel, and Karen Hunter. Don't Blame it on Rio: The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for Sex. 1st ed. New York: Grand Central Pub., 2008. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.

188

---. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body. “The Journal of Speculative Philosophy,”New Series, 19 (4), 230- 2005. Zack, Naomi, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell. Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions. [7] Vol. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Zack, Naomi. American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995. ---. Racesex: Their Sameness, Difference, and Interplay. New York: Routledge, 1997.

189