The American Portuguese Studies Association in collaboration with the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Global Portuguese forum are co-organizing a panel that reconsiders crime fiction in the Portuguese-speaking context. This panel foregrounds texts and films that both provide a dialogue with the genre in a global perspective while proposing a new understanding of crime fiction in the Portuguese language. Often considered a subgenre, or literature for entertainment due to its popularity (Franks, 2011), this session proposes a much-needed reconsideration and academic analysis of crime fiction in a diversity of contexts – historical, geographical, sociological, and political. More than producing a sensationalist effect, this genre serves as an undeniable portrayal of much that is unbalanced in our societies. The presentations’ diverse perspectives and theoretical approaches show the different ways in which this genre engages with critical questions of mass culture, queerness, masculinity, and social inequality. The panel brings together four short presentations of 13-14 minutes each, allowing for at least 15 minutes of discussion and questions at the end of the panel presentations. The panel includes two PhD students and two faculty members.

The first presentation, “Crimes and Mysteries in Rio de Janeiro: The Case of Aluísio Azevedo” is by Aline Almeida, Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her works shows that along with naturalistic novels and licentious writings, crime fiction flourished in late nineteenth century Brazil. She analyzes the work of renowned Brazilian naturalistic writer Aluísio Azevedo (1857-1913), exploring the boundaries between literary and journalistic writing. Almeida draws on three of Azevedo’s novels, Mistérios da Tijuca (1882), Mattos, malta ou Matta? (1884) and Memórias de um condenado (1886). She proposes to describe how Azevedo explored this genre’s hybrid configurations, merging facts and fictions both in the graphic aspect and the thematic field.

In the second presentation, “‘Os expulsos da carne agónica:’ Queer Ephemera as Evidence in Rubem Fonseca’s Agosto,” Jesse Rothbard, Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, analyzes Rubem Fonseca’s historical detective novel, Agosto (1990). He argues that the novel shatters the conventions of the traditional hardboiled detective story. By telling the story of a failed investigation, Fonseca reveals how fiction itself is a form of non-official, ephemeral, and therefore queer evidence of the past. This paper proposes to further examine the significance of queer ephemera serving as the link between the historical and fictional threads of the novel. At the same time it discusses Fonseca’s need of queerness and queer ephemera to tell the story.

Dorian Lee Jackson is Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University and his presentation proposes to examine how Brazilian writer Marçal Aquino’s use of the outer, national frontier departs from common representations of the Brazilian narcotrafficking as limited to urban environments. In “How the West was Won: Masculinity, Borders, and the Drug Trade in Marçal Aquino’s Cabeça a prêmio,” Jackson analyzes the extensive complex of political and criminal impunity of the Brazilian trade. Moreover, he discusses how Aquino’s presentation of interpersonal relationships nuances the construction of masculinity in crime fiction. He proposes that the novel engages in remapping the border region, as it critiques the transnational nexus of personal, political, and criminal relationships in Brazil. Further, the novel’s male agents of power possess fractured masculinities, rupturing the stereotypical “narcos” and drug lords in popular culture.

Jeremy Lehnen, Visiting Associate Professor at Brown University, in “Contagious Crime/Crime as Contagion: Zombies infecting Brazilian Cultural Production” considers how the zombie narratives function as a barometer (Dendle 2007) of socio-cultural anxieties in twenty-first century Brazil. Specifically, he analyzes how the narrations deploy the zombie genre as an allegory that channels socio-political anxieties around crime. His research interrogates contemporary Brazilian society to advance an acid criticism of putrid governmental policies of violence in which peripheral communities are scapegoated as incubators of crime. Also, Lehnen questions if the criticism are lamentations of a healthier fictional yesteryear supposedly free of crime. In this presentation, he attempts to get a pulse on these zombies of Brazilian cultural production to understand how this genre is infecting/inflecting narratives of crime in Brazil.