From literature to TV: National identity, race, and gender in Monteiro Lobato's 'Yellow Woodpecker Farm' stories (Jose Bento Monteiro Lobato, Brazil)

This study examines how the producers of the Yellow Woodpecker Farm (YWF) show, an early Brazilian TV series of the 1950s and 1960s, dealt with representations of national identity, race, and gender created by the paradigmatic Brazilian writer for children, Jose Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882–1948). Considered to be the “civil liberties hero” of Brazilian literature and a recurrent commercial success, Lobato depicted the Brazilian nation in his YWF.; To analyze the process of mediation from literature to TV of those representations, this study examines Lobato's habitus, his trajectory in the field of cultural production and his representations of the nation, national identity, race, and gender in his writings. These analyses provide the historical context and original meaning of Lobato's images before they were “adapted” to TV. Through the metaphor of the farm, Lobato excluded from Brazil's geographic and symbolic boundary “real” Blacks and non-Whites “by selection.” In his metaphor of Brazil, he would include “old Blacks” as symbols of the past and he would express a conflicted “White” Brazilian identity. In his representation of gender roles, Lobato profiled young Brazilian male and female models, which he opposed to stereotyped models of feminists and American women.; In the first TV version, aired between 1952 and 1963, Tatiana Belinky and her children's theater group reproduced the YWF stories omitting the most “obvious” “racist” depictions of Blacks. For political reasons, personal choices and technical limitations, Belinky's group restricted the TV version of the stories to the main characters, the farm boundaries, and the fantasy and memories of the plots. This reduced the visibility of Lobato's polemics, including his dispositions on Church dogmas, politics, and race. Female aptitudes gained more assertiveness, which suggests the scriptwriter's own dispositions on gender as well as the urban and “modern” mentalities of São Paulo's potential viewers.; The TV version kept Lobato's fame among new generations of potential readers, while minimizing the racial exclusion, whitening and degeneration more clearly presented in the books. By encouraging new viewers to read his books as modern might explain why certain conceptions of race die hard.