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“Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception, Intimacy and Adolescence in (the) Casa grande

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Book cover New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Part of the book series: New Directions in Latino American Cultures ((NDLAC))

Abstract

Fellipe Barbosa’s Casa grande (2014) focuses on the seventeen-year-old Jean as he struggles to liberate himself from the control of his wealthy parents. The film explores the affective ties that bind privileged adolescents and their families’ domestic employees, situating these within a Brazilian postcolonial context by taking Gilberto Freyre’s study of domestic arrangements during slavery, The Masters and the Slaves (1933), as its principal intertext. Jean’s crisis of masculinity, his relationship to his father and his peculiarly adolescent attempts at deceit enable Casa grande to critique the corrupt practices that have become associated with the Brazilian ruling class. However, the ‘affective alliances’ (Podalsky 2011: 8) Jean develops with his family’s employees are significantly undermined by the film’s partial reproduction of a problematic, patriarchal sexual politics.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their support of my current research through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

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  1. School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Rachel Randall

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  1. Rachel Randall
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Correspondence to Rachel Randall .

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  1. Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Geoffrey Maguire

  2. School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

    Rachel Randall

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Randall, R. (2018). “Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception, Intimacy and Adolescence in (the) Casa grande. In: Maguire, G., Randall, R. (eds) New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89381-5_5

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