Mas Então Ela é Escrava? Projections of Brazilian History and Fiction in the Soap Opera Escrava Isaura, 1976

This paper analyzes the telenovela Escrava Isaura, aired in Brazil from October 11 1976 to February 5 1977. This production enjoyed both particular attention from the media and a vast national audience, at a time when TV had become a significant and influential medium during the Brazilian dictatorship. Based on Bernardo Guimarães's homonymous novel written a century before (1875), the soap opera narrates the unfortunate life of a white female slave (the daughter of a Portuguese man and a freed black woman) and her misadventures to gain freedom and conquer love.  Even if slavery had been recently represented in some film features, particularly the successful comedy Xica da Silva (Carlos Diegues, 1976), the narrative and aesthetics proposed by Escrava Isaura unfolded a much more complex relationship between history and fiction, slavery and contemporary race relations than those displayed by any of its predecessors. Isaura was white in the telenovela (mixed race in the novel), changing the terms of debates around slavery's legitimacy, female sexuality, and contemporary race relations in Brazil. Escrava Isaura confronted the widely circulating ideas of Brazil as the offspring of a white master and a black slave. Escrava Isaura’s narrative of Brazilian slavery reveals how a cultural artifact fictionalized the past to effectively launch a conversation about contemporary race relations, female sexuality, and national spirit.