Surrendering to the Streets in Mid-Century Recife: The Living Legacies of Slavery in Black and White

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural history of the port city of Recife, the capital of the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, from the 1940s to the late seventies. Its focus is on the Mercado Público de São José, a bustling commercial node where affect, sex, and culture were exchanged as often as physical commodities. It examines the denizens and cultural practices of this storied space using an extraordinary 10,000 pages of handwritten diary entries produced by a municipal functionary who sympathetically documented the stories shared with him by poets, sex workers, entertainers, policemen, and vagrants. This material is supplemented by a rich array of sources from multiple subject positions, including music, published erotica, chapbook poetry (literatura de cordel), photographs, films, material objects, and expressive culture. This dissertation foregrounds two neglected forms of Black culture that take the form of black dolls. It first looks at mamulengo, an improvised form of puppet play historically practiced by and for poor and nonwhite men. Two chapters show how this practice, predicated upon interpersonal violence meted out by Black heroes, is simultaneously a form of Black protest and a perpetuation of anti-Black racism. The project then analyzes calungas, regally dressed tar black dolls that are highly visible components of Recife’s maracatus, as royal corteges of queens, ladies-in-waiting, and percussionists are known. It holds that calungas and maracatus are expressions of an alternative blackness to mamulengo, a female-centered practice whose prestige draws from a grammar of Africanicity. By illustrating the tight braiding of the “people’s” and “learned” culture, this dissertation confronts head on the enduring influence of racial hierarchy and domination on descendants of the slave quarters (senzala) and the big house (casa-grande).“Surrendering to the Streets” thus offers a fully contextualized urban cultural history of slavery’s afterlives in the capital of the northeastern state that received one-fifth of the enslaved Africans that landed in the Western Hemisphere. In presenting the broad resonances of slavery as “living,” the dissertation does not assume that these sociocultural inheritances are immutable, nor does it contend that poor and overwhelmingly nonwhite Brazilians are perpetually condemned to domination. Rather, it examines Brazil’s “public secret” of racism while exploring how Recife’s nonwhite majority contested these hierarchies through humor, religiosity, and forms of popular entertainment that proved capable of influencing the literate upper-class, with a chapter each focusing on the multitalented artist and documentarian Liêdo Maranhão (1925-2014) and Recife’s famed playwright and novelist Hermilo Borba Filho (1917-1976).