Surrealness of Race: Carlos Diegues, the Carnivalesque, and Afrocentric Narratives in Brazilian Cinema 1963-1999

Project Title

Surrealness of Race: Carlos Diegues, the Carnivalesque, and Afrocentric Narratives in Brazilian Cinema 1963-1999

Faculty Mentor(s)

Project Description

Brazil’s complicated racial history manifests in a visual culture with ambiguous borders between race, individual identity, and Brazilian national identity. This context fostered a cinema where Black representation is often subsumed into the broader category of Brazilian representation. Director Carlos Diegues made his nearly sixty year career through depicting Afrobrazilian narratives with unparalleled empathy and consideration via the integration of Afrocentric and often surreal modes of storytelling. These defining traits of Diegues’ cinema contrasted with his contemporaries of the Cinema Novo movement, whose portrayals of Afrobrazilians framed Black Brazilians as an insular part of a national Brazilian whole. This paper illuminates a parallel narrative of Brazilian cinema by decentering established film scholarship on the Cinema Novo movement and exploring Diegues’ own positionality as a white filmmaker telling Black stories. Through the incorporation of methodological lenses like Mikail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, adaptation theory, and Black media scholarship, this paper investigates how Black Brazilians in Diegues’ cinema carve new paths of Black representation in a country where race is often multivalent and complex.

Why is your research important?

Black representation is oftentimes framed as an American phenomenon rather than a global one. I think investigating the permutations of Blackness across the Americas is also necessary due to the complex nature and history of Afrolatin identity. Specifically with Brazil, a country that has a large and visible Black diasporic culture yet a complex racial history and society creates a cinema that has interesting representations of Blackness.

What does the process of doing your research look like?

In the beginning of the Oberlin Summer Research Institute (OSRI), it was a lot of reading. I relied a lot upon the scholarship of Robert Stam, who has been researching Brazilian cinema since at least the 1980s. And of course I’ve been watching a lot of films, primarily from the 1960s and 70s. I’ve watched a lot of films that I didn’t end up discussing explicitly in my research. So the latter half of my project has been a lot of picking and choosing what films create a cohesive narrative about Carlos Diegues

What knowledge has your research contributed to your field?

I think I’ve been updating established scholarship on Blackness in Brazilian cinema. Cinema Novo is usually the focus of English-language scholarship on Brazilian cinema and that movement’s relationship to Afrobrazilian representation is underresearched. Moreover, this academic interest in Brazilian cinema of the latter half of the twentieth century somewhat died out by the 1990s in English-language research. By combining my own Black experience with this field to provide an alternate and much needed new perspective on Brazilian cinema. 

In what ways have you showcased your research thus far?

I’ve done a Lightning Talk presentation (one minute presentation) in front of other members of OSRI and presented at the OSRI Symposium.

How did you get involved in research? What drove you to seek out research experiences in college?

In my senior year of high school, I was part of a research program called the Edith Hamilton scholars where I would do independent research outside of my schoolwork and present a fifteen minute presentation at the end of the year. I realized then that I really loved researching and investigating a problem. Throughout my career in Oberlin, I’ve put a lot of effort into researching, something that has continually been improved due to my art history classes. I will continue to pursue research as I love to do research. I want to become a professor who does research regularly.

What is your favorite aspect of the research process?

I describe it as “the hunt.” It’s when research is new and you’re sort of in a flow state of finding new information and you endlessly pursue a thread or idea until you’ve found out what you need to. It’s just really fun to have dedicated time to fully immerse oneself into a topic or field which is what I think cultivates this strong motivation to research.

How has working with your mentor impacted the development of your research project? How has it impacted you as a researcher?

My mentor has been extremely supportive and helpful because our meetings have always been a place to share ideas and keep me from getting stuck. Being that I’m very independent, it’s less that I have issues with getting research done and more with organizing my ideas and pursuing ideas that I can feasibly research in my allotted time. Prof. Sperling has guided me in the right direction so I can have an interesting project at the end of OSRI.

How has the research you’ve conducted contributed to your professional or academic development?  

I’ve always struggled with scope with research. I often have lofty goals of a comprehensive project that discusses various intersecting themes and pieces of media. While I often narrow my scope naturally through understanding I need to have a cohesive narrative to tell, I think OSRI’s length has made it so I had to reconcile scope with my research goals early, something that will make my future research better, more concise, and more effective. 

What advice would you give to a younger student wanting to get involved in research in your field?

I think the best piece of advice to give is that your research should be personal. As a Black woman researching in predominantly white fields, finding different ways Blackness manifests in media makes the world feel much larger and like I’m breathing new life into the fields that I love.