Playing Chinese Whispers: The Official ‘Gossip’ of Racial Whitening in Jorge Amado’s Tenda dos Milagres

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2014-03-26 17:36Z by Steven

Playing Chinese Whispers: The Official ‘Gossip’ of Racial Whitening in Jorge Amado’s Tenda dos Milagres

Forum for Modern Language Studies
Volume 50, Issue 2, April 2014
pages 196-211
DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqu006

Helen Lima de Sousa, Santander Post-Doctoral Senior Studentship in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies
Clare College, University of Cambridge

This article explores the possible inauthentic nature of official discourse, as political, religious or intellectual elites manipulate facts in a process that parallels the childhood game of Chinese Whispers. Considering this process of manipulation, and the false messages it produces, it is suggested that such discourses, while official, resemble the assumed inauthentic nature of gossip. Within the framework of this concept, the article explores the fusion of official and unofficial discourse in Jorge Amado’s novel Tenda dos milagres (1969). Initially analysing Amado’s fictionalization of the nineteenth-century Bahian doctor Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and his theories on racial whitening, the article subsequently investigates the continued manipulation of fact by the fictional Bahian political and intellectual elite of the 1960s as the image of the protagonist Pedro Archanjo is transformed, during the official posthumous celebrations of his life, from a poor mulatto who questioned the status quo, to an obedient, white intellectual.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , ,

“What Ain’t Called Melungeons is Called Hillbillies”: Southern Appalachia’s In-Between People

Posted in Anthropology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2011-01-04 03:15Z by Steven

“What Ain’t Called Melungeons is Called Hillbillies”: Southern Appalachia’s In-Between People

Forum for Modern Language Studies
Volume 40, Issue 3 (2004)
page 259-278
DOI: 10.1093/fmls/40.3.259

Rachel Rubin, Professor of American Studies
University of Massachusetts, Boston

The essay investigates literary evocations of Appalachia’s “in-between” people, the Melungeons. Melungeons are deployed by some as mystery (no one has conclusively traced their origins) and by others as solid fact (they are non-white) to shore up their own contingent sense of white privilege. The construction of Melungeon identity by outsiders has facilitated a process of “re-centring” whereby those poor white people so frequently scorned as “hillbillies” place themselves at the heart of a racialised mountain landscape.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , ,