Undying (and Undead) Modern National Myths: Cannibalism and Racial Mixture in Contemporary Brazilian Vampire Fiction

Abstract

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings of the vampire within a Brazilian cultural context. Exploring fiction's potential for rewriting dominant national narratives, they cast vampires as historical actors in order to protagonize indigenous and black "Others" in Brazilian history. However, at the same time as they rewrite both the nineteenth-century European literary origins of the vampire and the history of Brazil, they also reinscribe the modern myths of racial mixture, or mestiçagem, and cannibalism, or antropofagia, popularized by Gilberto Freyre and Oswald de Andrade, respectively. In this way, the novels exemplify the complex tension between revising and perpetuating cultural stereotypes in fictional retellings of Brazilian history.