Trajectories of the black female body in Brazil Circulations of racist and antiracist...

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Trajectories of the black female body in BrazilCirculations of racist and antiracist representations on a TV show

Joana Plaza PintoUniversidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil

In this paper, I offer a situated perspective on the political and semiotic land-scapes of the circulation of racist and antiracist images and texts in and around a dark-skinned female character, Adelaide, in the popular Brazilian TV show Zorra Total. I aim to differ and defer the character as a sign, in order to under-mine the character’s hegemonic frame of interpretation. First, I contextualize some resources used in a typical episode, including the character’s performance as a trajectory of racist signs about the black woman’s body. Next, I discuss the contemporary circulation of the character, confronted by the experience of discussing this character in an undergraduate classroom. In conclusion, I argue that by exposing trajectories of the black female body, it is possible to gather to-gether its fragmented signs as a multi-layered and overlapping set, and I identify these trajectories as a blind spot in the history of Brazilian racism.

Keywords: body, racism, gender, metapragmatics, trajectory, entextualization

1. Introduction

In Brazil, racist ideologies have taken on time-specific shapes, though always modern or colonial ones. Since the 1930s, these racist ideologies have been shaped as an ideology of ‘racial democracy’; an assimilationist project. At first, this Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ was strengthened by the recognition that in our country there was no physical persecution of the Jews as there was in Europe, nor did whites and blacks manifest violence and hostility towards each other, partic-ularly in comparison with other known countries such as the United States and South Africa. In other words, a political ideal of equal coexistence between whites and blacks was formed (Guimarães 2003). Later, in the 1960s and 70s – during the military dictatorship with its suspension of democracy – the expression ‘racial

Pragmatics and Society 6:2 (2015), 197–216. doi 10.1075/ps.6.2.03pinissn 1878-9714 / e-issn 1878-9722 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2015. John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAll rights reserved

198 Joana Plaza Pinto

democracy’ acquired a sense of ethno-cultural mixing and blending, and simulta-neously began to be questioned as a myth by Brazilian intellectuals of the period (D’Adesky 2006; Fernandes 1978 [1965]).

The main critique of ‘racial democracy’ argues that the contradiction between colonial heritage and modern design led to a model intended to overcome racial conflicts via the ‘subordinate integration’ of black people. It is a system of toler-ance with limits and is based on irony and sarcasm (Fernandes 1978 [1965]; Sales Jr. 2006), as well as on a persistent concealed segregation and controlled represen-tations of the black body in political and cultural contexts (Gonzales 1984; Pinho 2003, 2006; Sales Jr. 2006). This subordinate integration becomes an asymmetrical reciprocity which has been called ‘cordial racism’, a paternalist system of depen-dence where “a black person can ascend socially as long as s/he does not violate the ‘silent pact’ imposed by the rules of ‘cordiality’, which regulate favor exchanges and gratitude distribution as a form of obligation” (Sales Jr. 2006: 231).

Brazilian cordial racism gains its strength from the narratives of intellectu-als (especially Gilberto Freyre’s work), which portray the indolent sexual life of colonizers in the Portuguese colonial period (1500-1822), with a close and sup-posedly generous proximity between white men and indigenous and black wom-en. After independence from Portugal and even later, after the Imperial period (1822–1889), it also builds up the ideology of the Brazilian nation as a mixture of different (always racialized) groups. These narratives were widely disseminated among the population during the Estado Novo period (1930s and 1940s) and the military dictatorship (1960s and 1970s) – both truly nationalist periods in Brazil during which ideas about a unified population in a unified territory were nurtured.

In Brazil, a vision of ‘racial mixture’ as an organic and unitary national prod-uct is the effect of a State ideology that has supported nation building since the 1930s (Costa 2001). Rahier (2003) summarizes the dynamics of that notion in the construction of national identities in all of Latin America:

Mestizaje, mulataje, and other notions of ‘race’ and cultural mixings have played a central role in ‘official’ and hegemonic imaginations of Latin American and Caribbean national identities from the end of the 19th century to the 21st. These ideologies of national identities have usually downplayed the importance of con-temporary racism by proclaiming the myth of ‘racial democracy.’ At the same time, they have marginalized and marked as Others the individuals and commu-nities that do not fit the prototypical imagined hybridized identities. (Rahier 2003: 4)

This ‘racial mixture’ depends on the intimacies between unequal bodies (Pinho 2004), articulated by an eroticized inequality and a gender-race system. Together,


Trajectories of the black female body in Brazil 199

these notions shape representations of the black female body. These represen-tations have a special role in ‘racial democracy’ and condense this racist ideol-ogy into a single figure, the mulata, or mulatto woman – an eroticized black or mixed-race woman (Corrêa 1996; Gonzales 1984; Pinho 2004). However, this fig-ure sustains its rejected counterpart: “The mulata is the symbol of this graceful miscegenation that […] also helps reveal what one wants to hide: the rejection of the ‘negra preta’ [the dark-skinned black woman]” (Pinho 2004: 113).

In this paper, I offer a situated perspective on the political and semiotic land-scapes of the circulation of racist and antiracist images and texts in and around a dark-skinned female character, Adelaide, in the popular Brazilian TV show Zorra Total. My perspective is situated in a topical encounter of two different approaches on signs, texts and discourses: linguistic anthropology (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Blommaert 2001; Duranti 2004; Hanks 1989; Silverstein and Urban 1996) and deconstruction (Butler 1997; Derrida 1990). These two approaches emphasize the connections from sign to context and its discursive movement from co(n)text to co(n)text. Many works in linguistic anthropology discuss the linking of texts in various ways, paying special attention to the conditions of textuality (Hanks 1989; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Duranti 2004), but also to the text trajectories, a process in which signs (texts, discourses, images) are repeatedly decontextualized and recontextualized (Blommaert 2001; Silverstein and Urban 1996) in new texts and discourses, endorsing or confronting previous senses of the signs in motion. This movement of signs and its consequences is also a topic in deconstructionism. Derrida (1990: 30–31) argues that no context can enclose either itself, or a code; the opening up of the sign he calls différance. In French, the distinction between différence and différance is only visible in writing; hence what is delayed in speech (deferred) is also divergent (differed) in writing (Derrida 1967). This divergence sets in motion a modification of the presence (the Western ontology, the logos, the frozen sense, the fixed meaning); this modification is an alteration of the sign in its repetition, a supplement which differs (diverges, moves) and defers (delays, modifies) the center of a sign’s sense.

My position is that discourse is not a stable or fixed co-construction process and that this matters for textual analysis. My challenge here is to analyze a ra-cialized and gendered TV character, Adelaide, in her trajectories and her diver-gences, her linking with other texts and her opening up in relation to those texts.

Since text trajectories involve questions of power (Blommaert 2001; Silverstein and Urban 1996), I intend to remove the character from Adelaide’s previous and superficial context (a Saturday-night comedy show on the most watched channel in the country, TV Globo, broadcast to a large audience) and to place her in anoth-er context. I aim to analyze the character as a sign, in order to open up the charac-ter’s meanings (Derrida 1967, 1990) and to undermine the character’s hegemonic



frame of interpretation. By exposing the trajectories of Adelaide’s signs in a ‘cordial racist’ context of entextualization (Silverstein and Urban 1996), it is possible to look into the multi-layered, and often overlapping, processes of circulation of rac-ist and antiracist signs in contemporary Brazil.

First, I contextualize some resources used in a typical episode, including the character’s performance as a trajectory of racist signs about the black female body. Next, I discuss the contemporary circulation of the character, confronted by the experience of discussing Adelaide in an undergraduate classroom. Finally, I argue that by exposing sign trajectories about this black woman’s body, it is possible to gather together its fragmented signs as a multi-layered and overlapping set of historical racist signs. I identify these trajectories as a blind spot in the history of Brazilian racism.

2. Performances of cordial racism, or: “I sound racist but I’m just kidding!”

In 2012, Adelaide (Figure 1) entered a polemical scene. Adelaide is a popular character1 from the Brazilian TV show Zorra Total (an approximate translation might be “A Real Mess”), produced and broadcast by the largest Brazilian TV channel in terms of audience – TV Globo. Previously, Adelaide had been a char-acter in Rodrigo Sant’Anna’s theater comedy show, Comício Gargalhada (“The Po-litical Rally of Laughter”), where she is played by a man in drag. In 2012, however, Adelaide went to TV and was branded by the progressive media and the Brazilian black movement as a racist representation. The Secretariat of Public Policy for Racial Equality, the Federal Public Ministry and the Public Ministry of Rio de Janeiro (the city where TV Globo’s national headquarters are located), as well as some entities of the black movement and even individuals, all filed lawsuits against the TV channel, complaining that the character’s performance was a clear manifestation of racism, which in Brazil is considered a federal crime (with in-dictments not allowing for bail).

This controversial situation highlights the way that Adelaide has enacted racist representations of the black female body, by adding indexical meanings to the poor black woman and by intensifying certain embodied modes of language use. As Corrêa (1996) has pointed out, these indexical meanings continue past representations of the dark-skinned women, the mulata. With the portrayal of

1. To get an idea of Adelaide’s popularity, the character has 38 fan pages on Facebook; by Feb-ruary 2013, her official page had more than one hundred thousand ‘likes’. The male actor who plays her, Rodrigo Sant’Anna, also has a great many fan pages and fan ‘likes’.



Adelaide’s body, the dark-skinned woman remains represented as a poor, ugly and uneducated person.

As we see in Figure 1, Adelaide’s facial and corporal features are heightened and exaggerated in an allegoric manner by the obviously painted skin, the dis-proportionately large nose, the disordered hair with unconventional accessories, and a toothless smile. These attributes effectively index past representations of Brazilian black people in general, such as Tião Macalé (Figure 2), a perennially stoic black comedian of the 1980s. Another such famous figure of the past could be the dark-skinned woman, Tia Nastácia (Figure 3), a character from the Brazil-ian literature, who figured in a collection of tales by the famous author Monteiro

Figure 1. Adelaide on the subway, publicity photo provided by the TV Globo website

Figure 2. Toothless Tião Macalé, on his album cover Arraiá do Nojento (1989)



Lobato, published between 1921 and 1947, and also was broadcast by the same channel, TV Globo, as is Adelaide, in various adaptations (see Figures 4 and 5).

Invoking past representations of blackness in the popular media, in addition to the dark skin and female body, the dress with its rounded collar and the char-acter’s open smile both connect Tia Nastácia to Adelaide. A poor or working class appearance and silliness are her common implied characteristics, as can clearly be seen in Monteiro Lobato’s racist-inspired descriptions of Tia Nastácia, which attribute animal traits to the character and insult her appearance and intelligence in many other ways (Castilho 2004; Mussa 1989; Lajolo 1999). The illustration by

Figure 3. Tia Nastácia (the only black character in the image), in Manuel Victor Filho’s illustration for the 1972 edition of Monteiro Lobato’s complete works (published by Brasiliense). In this drawing, Tia Nastácia’s appears more similar to a pig than to the other human characters

Figure 4. Tia Nastácia pays attention to the protagonist girl Narizinho, in a TV Globo TV adaptation in 1977. Photo captured from a YouTube video



Manuel Victor Filho of Tia Nastácia (Figure 3) encapsulates and sums up these descriptions visually.

The indexical links between Adelaide and Tião Macalé are not only found in a smiling and toothless performance (Figures 2 and 5), but also in Adelaide’s catch-phrase performance: “Nojento!” roughly translated as “Disgusting!” or “Gross!”, a short exclamation which became famous in the 1980s as an expression of sudden emotion and disgust. The character played by Tião Macalé, called Crioulo Difícil (“Tricky little blackie”), was always involved in some trouble; when other charac-ters tricked him, he ended up saying “Nojento!” with a tearful face. Adelaide rou-tinely uses “Nojento!”, when her episode is almost finished, but she also adds her own catchphrase: “Eu sou a cara da riqueza” (“I’m the face of wealth”). This last phrase is sarcastic, uttered by someone who wants to look stylish and rich, while she in fact is not. Many Brazilian boys and girls catch on to these words and repeat them as a funny performance.2 In short, the black man or woman is portrayed here as a primitive clown, whose unsightly laughter makes others laugh. There is a racialized connection between the characters of Tia Nastácia, Tião Macalé and Adelaide, and their respective performances of blackness.

Nonetheless, in Adelaide’s performance, quoting Tião Macalé’s catchphrase “Disgusting!” does not stand out as much as does her own ‘new’ catchphrase: “I am the face of wealth”. A recent Brazilian phenomenon – the emergence of a new consumer group that has arisen with the help of social policies during the ten years of Workers’ Party government – is central here in the structure of Adelaide’s joke. Adelaide is a beggar who asks for money on the subway, but not for buying

2. For example one can find several homemade broadcasts satirizing Adelaide on YouTube, especially with toothless black little girls (who have lost their milk teeth the natural way) taking part in the fun.

Figure 5. Tia Nastácia smiling in a TV Globo TV adaptation broadcast, from 2001 to 2006. Publicity photo provided by the TV Globo website



food. At the beginning, she asks for: “Five centavos, ten centavos, twenty-five cen-tavos”, an amount not even enough to pay for the subway; in fact, she wants more than five centavos and more than food.3 The humorous breaking point – the mo-ment in the episode when the laughs are expected – is exactly when she explains to her interlocutor that she wants the money for a non-essential item (such as a trip to Paris, an i-pad, a smartphone, etc.). Her interlocutor is always surprised, but Adelaide asks: “Why are you surprised? Can’t poor people have this?” The explicit, intentionally humorous issue in these episodes emphasizes the rise of an emergent consumer group from the lower (and therefore predominantly black) classes in Brazil over the last ten years.

Besides in race, gender and class, the Adelaide character is also embodied in the ‘language’ she speaks. She constantly turns the voiced alveolar consonant /l/ into /r/, which serves as a popular metapragmatic index of uneducated people in Brazil. She also nasalizes and slows down her phrases, a linguistic practice rec-ognized in Brazil as infantile and uneducated. As Fanon (1952) has remarked, a black person is treated as an infant, or a speaker of mumbo-jumbo. This represen-tation presupposes the unequal and differential access to linguistic forms as being natural and frames it as manifesting a truncated repertoire (Blommaert 2005). In this way, it guides the interpretation of Adelaide’s performance as indexing her position; she does this by using bits of different registers, such as a phono-logical feature (by turning the voiced alveolar /l/ into /r/), or a metapragmatic imaginary performance (by slowing down her phrases). The metapragmatics of the ‘language’ she speaks – a stereotyped mockery of stigmatized non-standard varieties of Portuguese – thus casts Adelaide as a ludicrous racialized, gender- and class-determined character.

Adelaide’s episodes in Zorra Total always take place in the subway. In the screenplay, the extras can change all the time, but not Adelaide. The stereotype of the black woman, with its static and continuous meaning, is constantly present; the discontinuity offered by the movement of people on the subway contrasts with the racist continuity of Adelaide’s performance.

By combining a silly black male character’s catchphrase and smile, a black female character’s dresses and soliciting postures, along with a stereotyped mock-ery of stigmatized (bits of) varieties of non-standard Portuguese, into an index-ical order (Silverstein 1993, 2003) of ‘appropriateness-to’ a humorous TV show, Adelaide indexes race, gender, class, and language in the representation of the black female body: an ugly, uneducated dark-skinned woman. This indexical

3. The Brazilian real (R$) is divided into 100 centavos. R$1 is the equivalent of around US $0.30.



order of Brazilian racism is supported by a systematic representation of gender- race relations.

3. The broken silence: Recalibrating frozen racist signs

While I have qualified Adelaide’s performance as racist, it is important to recog-nize that this is not an authoritative or official interpretation. Rather, as I point-ed out previously, it represents the polemical and confrontational interpretation offered by a number of groups whose response to the series has been to contest the assumptions on which Adelaide’s performance is based. These groups in-clude the black movement, along with antiracist branches of government and the progressive media. This means that, on the one hand, the semiotic landscape of Adelaide – in its continuity of a racist representation of the black woman’s body – requires an analysis of the political landscape in which the character appears. That is to say, it is necessary to discuss certain aspects of the contemporary political landscape in which Adelaide was created and in which she circulates, along with her authoritative entextualizations and the hegemonic metadiscourse that medi-ates her assessment. On the other hand, whereas circulation involves questions of power, Adelaide’s authoritative entextualizations (like other recurrent entextual-izations in the field) impose no restrictions on circulation.

The above became clear to me while analyzing Adelaide’s controversial scene persona and the hegemonic metadiscourse behind it, at the same time that I was confronted with having to discuss them in an undergraduate classroom. This ex-perience deepened my analysis, as well as making the metadiscourses even more complex with regard to Adelaide’s text and its entextualization in the classroom. As Silverstein and Urban (1996: 11) argue, “Politics can be seen, from this per-spective, as the struggle to entextualize authoritatively, and hence, in one relevant move, to fix certain metadiscursive perspectives on texts and discourse prac-tices”. While attempting to contextualize and recontextualize Adelaide’s speech and images in this context, I was also dealing with hierarchical and insurgent entextualizations, along with the Brazilian ‘silent pact’ of racism. The encounter of these two sets of discourse practices articulated a Derridean différance, which supplemented the hegemonic metadiscourse on Adelaide, by both differing and deferring the authoritative entextualizations.



3.1 Struggles of racist and antiracist signs

The relationship between a text and a metadiscourse is not a transparent one. The dynamics of this relationship depends on ‘contextualization’, “the ever-changing ‘appropriate-to/effective-in’ relationships that concurrently develop between text and nontext” (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 15; Silverstein 1993, 2003).

When and why did the barely known theatrical character Adelaide emerge as a very popular and polemical TV character? What is her set of sign indexes? I have already highlighted her ‘appropriateness-to’ and ‘effectiveness-in’ the his-torical context of Brazilian racism, given its characteristic form as a ‘cordial’ kind of racism that is supported by a gender-race system. Next, I will discuss some recent Brazilian events in order to provide the context for Adelaide’s controversial appearance – the particular moment and conditions that allowed her texts and images to emerge and made my own analysis and classroom experiences possible (Blommaert 2001).

Adelaide’s premiere on the Zorra Total show – which has been broadcast since 1999 – occurred on May 12, 2012. Some days prior to this, on April 26, the Su-preme Court of Brazil issued a judgment that made racial and ethnic quotas for university entrance exams a constitutional obligation. To understand the signif-icance of this decision, it is necessary to revisit the recent past. Ever since the 1970s, national and international groups belonging to the Black diaspora have been promoting several antiracist projects as important ways of resisting the per-verse consequences of the ‘racial democracy’ ideology. The fight for racial and ethnic quota to be imposed for entrance to different institutions – especially the public universities4 – along with other antiracist projects, were material in break-ing the ‘silent pact’ that had been established to maintain the asymmetrical reci-procity of ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil (Sales Jr. 2006). In 2002, a public university in Rio de Janeiro was the first to adopt racial and class quota for its entrance examinations. Since then, one by one, many Brazilian public universities have adopted this type of quota.

The universities’ increasing adoption of the quota necessarily triggered a confrontation with the ‘cordial racism’, thereby complicating contemporary tra-jectories of racist signs. Discussed everywhere, but especially by academics and the media, these ‘affirmative action’ policies became a popular and polemical is-sue. This, again, strenghtened the struggle against the ‘silent pact’, as the activists joined forces with other strategies, proposed by academic studies and antiracist governmental branches all over the country.

4. It is important to highlight that public universities in Brazil are considered the best; atten-dance was a privilege to which only few had access prior to the 2002 affirmative action policies.



Countering this trend, the ‘silent pact’ has received support from many right-wing politicians, celebrity figures and intellectuals during the first decade of the present century. The backlash is essentially based on the popular and familiar arguments of the earlier (1930s) ‘racial democracy’ ideology, proclaiming that the biological and cultural mix of the Brazilian population has resulted in a new people and culture. And, since this new hybrid culture already has integrated the nation, no affirmative action policies are required.

The same ideology has been reinforced by numerous conservative entextual-izations in the form of books, news articles, discussions on radio and TV, etc. The title of a book by TV Globo’s editor-in-chief Ali Kamel is a good example: Não somos racistas, or “We are not racists” (Kamel 2006). According to him, Adelaide does not constitute a ‘racist sign’, because one can encounter many ‘Adelaides’ on Brazilian streets up and down the country; hence Adelaide just represents a typical poor Brazilian woman; rather than representing the sensual mulata, she embodies the ‘real’ Brazilian woman. Moreover, since November 2012, when the first lawsuits were filed against TV Globo, the male actor who plays Adelaide, Rodrigo Sant’Anna, has declared in several interviews that the of Adelaide charac-ter is in fact inspired by his grandmother Adélia.

Sales Jr. (2006: 230) argues that integration is a “product of sociability rules which establish an asymmetrical reciprocity which, once broken, justifies the ‘sus-pension’ of friendly treatment and the adoption of violent practices”. By attaching his character to a ‘real’ person in his close environment – a ‘beloved relative’ –, Sant’Anna invokes the ‘just kidding’ excuse, such that the implicit violence of the representation remains outside the equation.

Figure 6. Grandmother Adélia and her grandson, Adelaide’s performer Rodrigo Sant’Anna, both apparently mimicking Adelaide. Photo by Roberto Moreyra, available on the TV Globo website



In the Brazilian racial struggle, the university entrance exam quota have played a central part. The political landscape in which the Adelaide character emerges shapes the racist meanings that surround her. The open conflict between racist and antiracist ideas reached its high point during the Supreme Court debates, but it did not stop there. On the one hand, as I mentioned before, Adelaide has a large number of fans and the fame of her performance has spread both to the TV chan-nel and the male actor who plays her; the latter has become famous and has been given several opportunities (in interviews and articles) to protest, in a humorous way, his innocence with regard to the racist implications of his Adelaide perfor-mance. On the other hand, the character emerged under particular conditions (as a familiar, embodied racist representation) and at a particular moment (the time of the victorious antiracist decision of the Supreme Court), the character Adelaide was submitted to several analyses in the antiracist media (and even was the subject of several lawsuits). Black women columnists and leftist journalists posted many critical reviews of the character Adelaide on their websites, while many indepen-dent voices called for an online mobilization against the character; cf. the face-book-suggested one-day boycott “Um dia sem Zorra Total” (“A day without Zorra Total”) and the invitation to tweet the hashtag “#racismontvnao” (“no racism on TV”). Even the Special Secretariat for Policy on Racial Equality, an agency of the Brazilian government, supported a public civil lawsuit against TV Globo.5

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of uni-versity entrance exam quota, the popularity of Adelaide’s performance illustrates what Dahia calls the ‘mediating role’ of laughter in Brazilian racism:

Inscribed on the border between distinct realities – the psychic and social, con-scious and unconscious, the playful and the serious – laughter is able to articulate these realities by contributing to the consolidation and concealment of present racism. That is because the laughter obtained from a racist joke carries an am-biguity, complicating the precise definition of its nature and allowing it to cross over into different realities. Humorous speech seems to be one of the Brazilians’ only ways to address experiences of racial identity conflicts. Through laughter, Brazilians find an intermediate way to vent their latent racism, circumventing censorship and critical comment on the content and the scope of symbolic satis-faction that this laughter provides, while not compromising on their self-repre-sentation as a non-racist person. (Dahia 2008: 697–698; my translation, JP)

5. The Geledes website (a highly popular Black feminist website) monitored the impact of the Adelaide character by posting many news items dealing with such lawsuits and also by referring to other sources on the topic (columns, interviews, live and online mobilizations, etc.). For references, go to ‘Adelaide’ on http://www.geledes.org.br/.



In Brazil, antiracist ideologies work by demanding legal rights for the racially op-pressed, as well as by exposing the historical trajectories of racist texts and images, thus obstructing the modes of circulation of racist images and speech. The circu-lation of antiracist texts and images (for example, texts regarding legal decisions and antiracist articles and interviews) has broken the silence about racism.6 In Judith Butler’s (2007) words,

We cannot understand th[e] field of representability simply by examining its explicit contents, since it is constituted fundamentally by what is cast out and maintained outside the frame within which representations appear. We can think of the frame, then, as active, as jettisoning and presenting, and as doing both at once, in silence, without a visible sign of its operation and yet effectively. (Butler 2007: 953)

As already Gonzales (1984) observed, the figure of the dark-skinned woman, even though violently repressed, is an effective counter-figure in Brazilian culture, because she represents the non-eroticized counterpart of the mulata: an invisible sign reminding us of our ambiguous and repressed unequal racialization. And so, at the exact moment when the antiracist ideologies are gaining force, having obtained an important victory (in the quota case), the body of the dark-skinned woman emerges in the political landscape, to once more promote a self-preserv-ing racist laughter.

3.2 A discussion experience

Who are the people who discussed the Adelaide performances and in what con-text? Blommaert (2001: 26) reminds us that “the time, place and occasion at which data are being gathered have an effect on the data: they are what they are because they occurred in that shape in that context.” During the second semester of 2012, I was the professor in charge of an elective undergraduate class on Pragmatics in my university. The classroom routine was reading-cum-debate: we read texts (papers or books proposed by the professor) and then discussed their main ideas.

In the course syllabus, the main titles are theoretical works; their few occur-ring examples are only summarily presented for analysis. That is why during the course, we agreed to set aside some days for the discussion of empirical material (also as an exercise for the final assignment, which was to be an analytically fo-cused and empirically grounded paper). As this was a four-month course and,

6. This ‘breaking of the silence’ is also evident from the recent increase in the number of com-plaints about racism in the legal system (Sales Jr. 2006; Santos 2012).



by the time we made this agreement, three quarters of the course had already elapsed, the exercise naturally was somewhat limited in scope. My proposal was to choose some material, and let the students discuss it freely, without my con-stant intervention, so that they themselves could determine how to approach it. The idea of this little exercise was to try and “use (inductive) empirical facts as point of departure”; the approach is “‘conjectural’ because these facts are seen as probably meaning this-or-that” (Blommaert and Jie 2010: 13; my italics, JP).

At the same time, TV Globo was being sued by a number of different institu-tions and people as being responsible for the character Adelaide. Given that “text is one kind of metadiscursive interpretation of a phase of discourse” (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 4), I chose Adelaide’s ‘racist signs’ as indicative of a polemic in the media that could stimulate our discursive practices.

This exercise lasted two weeks, comprising a total of eight hours of discus-sions. I did not record these hours on any device (neither video nor audio). I remained in a corner of the classroom taking notes, as I had also done during some previous mediated debates. The corner was not invisible – on the contrary, as the professor in charge, I was often called upon by the students to decide some impasse or to give them ‘the proper answer’. Most importantly, as the discussions went on, I contributed more information about the character; in addition, the whole class also brought with them much of the information they were in posses-sion of and added this to the debate.

The class consisted of thirteen Brazilian students: ten women and three men. The majority was white, although three self-identified as Black and two recog-nized themselves as mestiço (of white-black ‘mixed race’). Half of the students were in their final semester; the other half were finishing their second year. Im-portantly, all were born and raised in Central Brazil and shared closely related and easily recognizable linguistic features.

Given the moment and circumstances of production, we started the first session by watching three Adelaide episodes, two edited performances by Tião Macalé, and two TV interviews with Rodrigo Sant’Anna (the male actor who played Adelaide). Most of the students already were familiar with the character, mostly from the social media (e.g. in the shape of photos and catch-phrases) and from TV advertisements for Zorra Total. Only two of the students had watched complete episodes on TV – most of the others had seen them on YouTube. Only one student claimed to have never seen the character, although by the end of the first session she said she remembered Adelaide’s face from a Facebook post.

During the forty minutes of the first episodes, the students’ laughter was quite restrained, as was to be expected in a formal classroom; however, by the end of the first session and especially in the following sessions, two of the students laughed openly upon remembering parts of the episodes. The parts that got most laughs



were those where Adelaide, who had just been begging for money, showed off her expensive product (e.g. a mobile phone or an i-pad) and asked, “Can’t poor people have this?” Even so, some of the students did not laugh at all and claimed that Adelaide was not funny.

Following the viewing, the students freely discussed various pieces of infor-mation about the character, putting forward their opinions on what these perfor-mances show in terms of cause and effect. Some students even discussed Adelaide’s performance ratings. One student claimed that Adelaide’s catch-phrase – “I’m the face of wealth” – already existed earlier and indexed a proud person who wanted to look rich and had to hide his/her poverty using appearance and ostentation. While they commented on the relationship between Adelaide and her catch-phrase, “I’m the face of wealth”, they made no connection to Tião Macalé’s old catchphrase, “Disgusting!”

Some agreed that Adelaide’s linguistic performance projected a stereotypical beggar figure. One female student said: “A beggar speaks just like this when ask-ing for money.” This stereotypical language was assessed prosodically as “coming close to crying”. The students also brought up that the character’s text was linked to issues of social mobility; some of them repeated stereotypical phrases recently found in the Brazilian press, such as: “The ‘poor’ beggars are fake: they want to take advantage of other people’s kindness (or of the government)”, or: “Everyone is into consumption, even those who should not be.”

While on the one hand, the old catchphrase “Disgusting” did not stand out in classroom discussion, just as the new one “I am the face of wealth” did (thereby highlighting the relationship between the character and the ‘rise of a new mid-dle class’), the moment that produced the most laughter was when the character showed her middle-class objects (mobile phone, i-pad), even though she would need to pay for them in many monthly installments. Thus, the classroom’s focus-ing on Adelaide’s class mobility indexes the authoritative entextualization of her performance. Such a fixed entextualization is current in the conservative media, which have criticized the social policies of President Lula (2003–2011) and Presi-dent Dilma (2012 to present). The class also projected Adelaide’s entextualization of recent events (Prince William’s wedding, a flooding in Rio, the rise of the new middle class) at the same time that it did not ignore the beggar stereotype.

On the other hand, when I added another path to Adelaide’s trajectory, of-fering a new context to reconfigure her texts and images, the students began to link her performance to the permanence of certain known stereotypes: the black woman, the uneducated speaker. One black student referred to an interview with Rodrigo Sant’Anna, in which he says that he is neither black nor white, but rather a “capitão do mato” – a colonial figure embodying racial betrayal: the mestiço who hunts down runaway black slaves. Some of the students realized that their model



for entextualizing Adelaide was exclusively based on recent texts, thus subordi-nating (by not highlighting) the texts ‘of the past’.

Although I did not show any images of Tia Nastácia, still, two women stu-dents focused on Brazilian racist patterns of beauty, which recalled the mulata vs. negra preta opposition. As Butler argues (2007: 953), “certain larger norms, often racializing and civilizational, are able to instate their structuring effect on what for the time being is called ‘reality’”. Since the students did not explicitly in-voke the stereotype of the black woman, this cultural value cannot be said to have been “indexically articulated” (Silverstein 2003). Nonetheless, issues of ‘beauty patterns’ and ‘poor uneducated people’ both invoke some familiar aspects of the stereotype of the black woman, as an echo from the past, a shadow of other in-dexical meanings.

Texts travel through time and space, changing their meanings over time; but they also perform meanings that are both insisted upon and naturalized (Blommaert 2001; Silverstein and Urban 1996). For this reason, some non-the-matized background of what is represented in the sedimented meanings of a text (Butler 2007) must also be approached. But how to do this? I want to argue that it is the différance (Derrida 1990), the alteration in the repetition of the signs, that enables us to differ and to defer their fixed and frozen meanings. As long as we can create an intersubjective entextualization, our analysis becomes more profound, so that we are able to recalibrate an antiracist metadiscourse covering racist signs. When the students and I inserted Adelaide’s text in different trajec-tories, some of the students called attention to the importance of recent events for interpreting Adelaide’s narratives; others focused on the bodily patterns and the ‘not funny at all’ stereotypes. These new insertions in our chain of entextual-izations resulted in a metadiscursive co-construction of the Adelaide character which provided us with a complex pathway towards confronting the naturaliza-tion of racist representations.

4. Concluding remarks

In 2012, in Brazil, laughing at a dark-skinned woman’s performance could be read as a suspension of the usual ‘friendly treatment’ by adopting her stereotyped and stigmatized violent representation. As Butler (1997: 5) states, “the body is alter-nately sustained and threatened through modes of address”. The black woman’s body remains pivotal of this violent activity. As I already pointed out, Adelaide’s performance is linked to the continuity of known stereotypes of the black body representing an ugly and uneducated speaker.



I moreover argued that Adelaide’s indexical meanings indicate that the textual trajectories also depend on body trajectories. As marks of différance, these tra-jectories are at once differed and deferred in the long chain of entextualizations, whose past and future cannot be fully retold or predicted (Butler 1997). For the time being, however, the certainty I have is that both trajectories “and entextual-ization practices turn out to be about ‘identity’” (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 10).

There are several resources that inform the political and semiotic landscapes of Adelaide’s circulation. However, in my classroom experience, the students’ laughter explicitly indexes the emergent signs of the poorer social classes. This highlights the recent texts on the growing class of ‘poor’ consumers as constitut-ing Adelaide’s first authorized textual trajectory, before venturing into texts ‘of the past’. The dark-skinned woman remains in the shadow of meaning, but not without effects.

I have no doubt that the circulation of texts involves shifts in contexts (Blommaert 2001, 2005), thus changing their meanings over time, but also per-forming sedimented meanings that have become ‘naturalized’ by tactics involved in ideology. Indeed, “every step in the trajectory involves inequalities in resourc-es” (Blommaert 2005: 64). In this sense, the problem might be how textual trajec-tories should be analyzed when the condensed historicity in certain meanings is pushed outside, sidelined, made invisible, by imprinting its naturalizing force on the text, which it constructs as a kind of blind spot in its own historicity. We must challenge the methodological comfort of immediate co(n)text and confront the historicity of circulations. From a poor or working class appearance and silliness to the past representations of blackness in the popular media and on to the past racist slavery history, some bits of (textual and bodily) signs are invisible, while others are emphasized. The blind spot is exactly the point where the invisible signs are the more sedimented, where the circulation of meanings erases some of its marks and denies their existence.

Adelaide’s signs are a set of different layers of meaning and they overlap each other. Recent events are undisclosed in a visible layer (Prince William’s wedding, a flooding in Rio, ‘the rise of the new middle class’), but they overgrow and hide other layers of meanings, such as unconscious laughter or continuity of blackness representations. Derrida (1990) taught us that no context can enclose itself. Fol-lowing the trajectories of (re)entextualized marks of a text and exposing its rep-etitions and alterations is not to enclose its context in a shape, but to discuss the performativity of its circulation. It is not about ‘uncovering’ some ‘real meaning’. It is rather about discussing how all these layers have effects at the same time at different levels of legitimacy, some of them remaining in the shadow and others becoming authorized meanings, and how those differences involve ideology.



I am neither defending a particular format nor a given substance, but rather an opening. Talking to the class has expanded some restricted meanings, altering the meaning of Adelaide by inserting her texts and images in another context and another entextualization, a ‘quote’ that shifts its meaning and also multiplies possible contexts. By exposing sign trajectories of the black female body, we may confront and approach these signs – such as recent events, unconscious laughter, a repressed past, and violent representations – as a multilayered and overlapping set of meanings.

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to Paula de Almeida Silva, Daniel Silva, Osmundo Pinho and Claudio Pedrosa, for their valuable suggestions during the writing of this pa-per. I would also like to thank Sara Roberts for her detailed proofreading.

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About the author

Joana Plaza Pinto is an Associate Professor at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, in central Brazil, and a fellow researcher at the CNPq (the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). She completed her Master’s degree (1998) and Ph.D. (2002) in Linguistics at Unicamp (University of Campinas). She also did part of her doctoral studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, 1999–2000), under the supervision of

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621031.004

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the philosopher Jacques Derrida. She conducts research in pragmatics, gender and feminism, with a multidisciplinary approach, mainly in the following issues: speech acts, body, performa-tivity, identity, metadiscourses and epistemic decolonization.

Address for correspondence

Joana Plaza PintoFaculdade de Letras / Universidade Federal de GoiásCampus II – Caixa Postal 131 – bureau 4574001-970 Goiânia – GO – Brazil

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Trajectories of the black female body in Brazil Circulations of racist and antiracist...

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