This session will respond to key questions that the presidential theme invites us to consider, including “What are the intolerable conditions under which we work? What are the new conditions we need? What new conditions are emerging from literary thought and research?” Addressing these topics with a focus on Luso-Afro-Brazilian literary, cultural, and intellectual works allows for reflections on working conditions not only in the geographic spaces and linguistic realms that we study, but also in our academic field based primarily in the United States, Brazil, and Portugal. The global COVID-19 pandemic has strained working and living conditions, especially in Brazil where budget cuts have slashed funding for humanities and the arts. These current working conditions put earlier depictions of labor, workers, and social movements into relief. The session will examine continuities, convergences, and divergences between our contemporary working conditions and their previous iterations. In doing so, the panelists will dialogue with existing scholarship by Conceição Evaristo, Lélia Gonzalez, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors on Black writing as a labor of survival and resistance; Sônia Roncador on domestic labor; Sophia Beal and Adriana Johnson on the infrastructures of architecture and cinema in constructing Brazil; and Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. on constructiosn of the Northeast and the rural worker.
The session will feature four panelists who will give formal presentations of twelve to fourteen minutes long. This allocation of time will ensure that the session allows for introductory remarks as well as a robust period of at least fifteen minutes of discussion. The session will open with Jordan B. Jones’s paper on how Marcelo D’Salete’s recent graphic novels depict slave labor and, more critically, Black resistance to slavery in colonial Brazil. Jones links D’Salete’s creative work to the essential labor of interrogating established historical narratives to offer spaces of inquiry, critique, and resistance for contemporary racial justice movements. While Jones focuses on enslaved Africans as one key category of labor in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies, Thomaz Amancio will examine the role of another essential category: the rural worker. His presentation concentrates on the writings of Silvio Romero and Antonio Candido to understand experiences of rural labor and culture in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. By analyzing connections between the two scholars, Amancio will interrogate the role of the rural worker in the cultural and intellectual interpretations of Brazil. The next presenter, Robert Pritchard, turns his attention to ideas of class consciousness and literary labor in the novels of Jorge Amado. He reads Amado’s Cacau as a proletarian novel that expresses an incipient embrace of Marxist theory in relationship to Brazil of the 1930s. The final panelist, Ian Erickson-Kery, will explore the construction of the modernist capital Brasília. With a focus on the 1960s and 1970s, this final presentation will link innovative architectural projects to the construction work and cinematic construction of Brazil proposed by Cinema Novo and, specifically, the films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. These presentations will invite a deeper understanding of the intersectional experiences of labor in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian context from the seventeenth century through the contemporary moment.