Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999

Roncador, Sônia

doi:10.1057/9781137353801

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…41 In her landmark study of domestic servants in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century Brazil, Sonia Roncador argues that black female servants particularly functioned 'as a quintessential trope of otherness, serving as utilitarian counterparts' to hegemonic models of femininity. 42 In a similar fashion, the construction of subordinate-caste domestic woman worker in colonial India was a constitutive footnote in the representation of the dominantcaste, middle-class housewife, contributing to a rhetoric that 'naturalized' inequality and allowed ideas of the 'self' and 'other' to be validated. The conjunction of subordinate-caste women servants in a large part of these advice books was steeped in clichés, whereby they were decoded and recoded into a 'comfortable' system of representation.…”

Section: Instruction Manuals Caste and Women Domestic Workersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

Gupta

2018

Studies in History

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This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging ‘ideal’ servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.

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Section: Instruction Manuals Caste and Women Domestic Workersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

Gupta

2018

Studies in History

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“…In this special issue, the complex (even paradoxical) nature of the cordial and intimate relationships between domestic workers and their employers in Brazil are the focus of articles by Lúcia Sá, Stephanie Dennison and Gui Perdigão. Their analyses, together with those undertaken by Sônia Roncador (2014), Deborah Shaw (2017), Tiago de Luca (2017) and Rachel Randall (2018a, 2018b, constitute an important recognition and exploration of the significant, emerging interest in domestic work and domestic workers in Latin American cultural production. All of their articles draw on Freyre and Buarque de Holanda's frameworks, demonstrating that although their theories may appear "outdated", as Perdigão notes, their contribution to our ability to understand contemporary Brazilian society and culture remains critical.…”

Section: Domestic Workers In Brazilmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cordiality and intimacy in contemporary Brazilian culture: introduction

Randall

2018

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies

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This article serves as an introduction to a special issue on intimacy and cordiality in contemporary Brazilian cultural production. It traces these purported "national traits" back to their exploration in Gilberto Freyre's renowned Casa-grande & senzala (1933) and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's Raízes do Brasil (1936). While Freyre emphasises the formative influence of the close ties between Afro-Brazilian wet-nurses and landowning families in the colonial era, Holanda's schematisation of the "cordial man" focuses on the sinister consequences of the Brazilian drive towards intimacy. The articles enclosed are informed by Holanda's suggestion that the country's colonial heritage and patriarchal culture has complicated the institution of a clear distinction between the private (familial) and public realms. The recent wave of Brazilian cinema and TV series that focuses on the figure of the maid evocatively foregrounds the continuing primacy of intimate relationships in Brazil, including in films by Anna Muylaert and Kleber Mendonça Filho, which are analysed in this issue. The link between cordiality and cruelty is also explored to provide a context for articles that reflect on the frailties of Brazilian state apparatuses, which have led to social breakdown, and even to the use of coercion or torture.

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“…4 One can find clues about the labor conditions in domestic service and the logic of the labor market faced by the legally free working poor here and there in police records, classified announcements in newspapers, or, occasionally, in literary sources. 5 Less commonly, these clues surface in judicial records.…”

Section: The Domestic Labor Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Wages of Intimacy: Domestic Workers Disputing Wages in the Higher Courts of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Lima

2015

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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Exploring the legal context and arguments put forth by women who sued for their wages, this article illustrates how contested definitions of “work” and “intimacy” played a fundamental role in the arguments that both domestic workers and those whom they challenged in court made. It discusses a sample of legal complaints concerning labor arrangements (specifically, wage contracts, or contratos de soldada) from the Brazilian National Archives involving women working in the households of single men or widowers in nineteenth-century Brazil. Brought by both former slaves and Portuguese immigrants and other “free” women, domestic workers advanced demands for compensation, claiming wages and entitlements that clearly defined their connection to their masters as “work,” even when personal intimacy and sex were also present. The article also considers the place occupied by “free” domestic work in a slave society, relating it to the changing legal and social context of nineteenth-century Brazil.

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Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

Cordiality and intimacy in contemporary Brazilian culture: introduction

Wages of Intimacy: Domestic Workers Disputing Wages in the Higher Courts of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

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