The notes are good and I’ve been thinking about all of this far too intermittently for far too long.
Some of them I don’t think I will write down because – I know them by heart, really. But Cecilia, the character, is ILLEGIBLE and the novel keeps telling you you have to read her, and the novel as anti-slavery or as progressive in any other way is opaque/illegible too (this is why Lazo’s work is so useful, and Sommer’s on its long process of gestation).
The mulata is a symbol of the nation but at the same causes great anxiety, and has to die/disappear; this gives us gender problems (see another ancient book, Kutsinski’s) … the objective is to hide the Black mother, which everyone has had one of in one way or another, since white people had Black amas de leche.
Schwarz: slavery doesn’t fit with luzes and liberal discourse, it’s a contradiction, an idéia fora do lugar, that Brazilian society fixes by the convention of the favor (you ask that the person in charge, as a favor, does his liberal duty, the official one). This allows liberalism to be substituted by a conservative paternalism.
I don’t know how well Cecilia fits with this. But I was going to write something about all of it, and include the Brazilian telenovela O REI DO GADO, where classes reconcile through the earth, everyone (Indians, peasants, landholders) have this relationship with the earth, and it isn’t mentioned that landowners can be capitalists.
Those were these notes, and somehow I can use them now.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 