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Flávio Borges Faria

Visiting Graduate Student Researcher

Doctoral Candidate, Universidade de Brasília
Flávio Borges Faria is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at the Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. He has published articles on Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and the Brazilian writer Lima Barreto. He will be at Northwestern to develop his dissertation project titled Raça, língua e tradição: o “pretuguês" na literatura contemporânea brasileira. More specifically, during his visit as a pre-doctoral scholar, he will be working, under the supervision of professor César Braga-Pinto, on the second chapter of his dissertation,which deals with the monumental historical novel Um defeito de cor (2006) by Ana Maria Gonçalves. As Flávio’s project outlines in his project, the novel is based on historical documents found by the author herself on the Island of Itaparica, in the state of Bahia, dating from the beginning of the 19th century. According to her, the text, written in the form of a diary, follows the life of Kehinde, a black woman born in Salvalu, the former kingdom of Dahomey in Africa, in the 19th century. The narrative highlights the character's enslavement process when she was captured by the slave trade in Ouidá, the west coast of Africa, currently the Republic of Benin, towards Salvador. This narrative reveals important historical details of private life under the slavement regime, as well as the resistance strategies of slaves in the face of the symbolic oppression of whiteness at the time. The text further portrays the daily relationships on the plantation between enslaved black people and their masters in the face of important historical transformations in the country, such as Brazil's independence and the Malê revolt. On a personal level, Flávio also enjoys ballroom dancing as well as playing the guitar and the “cavaquinho”.