Archive and Repertoire of Black Culture in Fiction: Jorge Amado's Tenda dos Milagres

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to examine the novel Tenda dos Milagres (1969) by Jorge Amado, considering it as an archive of Afro-descendant culture. To this end, we will use reflections on the relationship between archive and fiction developed by authors such as Keen (2003), Codebò (2010), and Gonzáles Echevarría (2011), as well as the concepts of repertoire and performance also related to the archive, as theorized by Diana Taylor (2013). Thus, grounded in the thinking of these authors, we will observe issues related to the forms of recording ancestral culture (re)presented in the novel and situations surrounding these records, such as the clashes between the knowledge of the white, dominant elite and the traditional knowledge of the black and excluded people in the city of Salvador, Bahia, during the first decades of the 20th century, as well as the appropriation of this same knowledge by the same elite at the end of the century, transforming it into profitable products of mass culture/cultural industry, which was fully developing at that time, driven by the business-military dictatorship. On our journey towards the free and vast territory of Pelourinho, the setting of the narrative and the locus of enunciation of the protagonist Pedro Archanjo, other theorists will accompany us, helping us to think through the plurality that constitutes the novel in focus.