Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Theodicy and Ideology: ‘Everybody Needs an Ideology to Live’
- Chapter 2 The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth; But in the Meantime They Shall Watch Telenovelas
- Chapter 3 Suffering Soaps; Fragmented Bodies
- Chapter 4 The Politics of the Vagina
- Chapter 5 The Redemptive Womb
- Chapter 6 The Invisible Back
- Final Feliz
- Illustrations
- Table: Women Respondents
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Foreword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Theodicy and Ideology: ‘Everybody Needs an Ideology to Live’
- Chapter 2 The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth; But in the Meantime They Shall Watch Telenovelas
- Chapter 3 Suffering Soaps; Fragmented Bodies
- Chapter 4 The Politics of the Vagina
- Chapter 5 The Redemptive Womb
- Chapter 6 The Invisible Back
- Final Feliz
- Illustrations
- Table: Women Respondents
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Janie grows up with her ex-slave grandmother in the yard-room of a kindly, wealthy white family in rural western Florida. She plays all the time with the four white children. One day a roving photographer takes a picture of the five children:
“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn't nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat's where Ah wuz s'posed to be, but Ah couldn't recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ask, ‘where is me? Ah don't see me’.
“Everybody laughed… ‘Dat's you…don't you know yo'ownself?’ … Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said:
“‘Aw aw! Ah'm coloured!’
“Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Am seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest.
(Zora Neale Hurston 1937)Rereading Body Parts on Planet Slum brought to mind this icon of Janie in Hurston's novel of more than fifty years earlier. The impoverished women of the bairros of Salvador with whom Beljuli Brown lived and worked are also the descendants of African slaves. I want to ask: how similarly and how differently from Janie do these women find themselves, mirrored in the white, middleclass heroines of the soap operas that play day in, day out on broken-down televisions in overcrowded shacks?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Body Parts on Planet SlumWomen and Telenovelas in Brazil, pp. ix - xviPublisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011