Fall 2022 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment / RACE EMPIRE ENVIRONMENT

Of Milk, Blood, and Bones: Brazil’s Colonial and Postcolonial Plantation "Big House"

with Ana Ozaki, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Isadora Mota, History

October 25 at 12pm EST 2022

Attend this discussion in Betts Auditorium, abiding by University event guidelines. Box lunches are provided while supplies last.

Or register in advance for this Zoom webinar:
https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iBApUPu0RxyRoQK1mTrkQg

Gilberto Freyre's influential book Casa Grande e Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves] (1933) has been an international reference in Brazil's historical racial relations. In this equally historiographical and fictional study, a benevolent rendering of the plantation's "big house" stands for Brazil, that is, as the root of its modern, exceptional, and multiculturalist society. In this view, colonial domesticity's openness to "masters" and "slaves" nurtured interracial relations, miscegenation, and transculturation. According to Freyre, spatial practices such as implanted bones and blood in building foundations and breast milk ties between white boys and their Black wet nurses embodied some of Brazil's hybridity matrices.

In this presentation, Ozaki will analyze these historiographical and spatial tropes to contend how the plantation permeated modern frameworks of territory and domesticity. She will argue that Brazil's nation-building process was contingent upon bodily accumulations to forge perceptions of racial fluidity, tropical adaptability, and alternative modernity to Europe's and the US's binary racial dynamics.

The Mellon Forum is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, HMEI, PIIRS, PLAS, Department of Art + Archaeology, Department of English, and the School of Architecture.