Entre Grande Otelo e Sebastião: tramas, representações e memórias

Abstract

The thesis consists in an analysis of the integrality of Sebastião, negro, actor, Umbanda spiritist, politician, poet, writer, composer and father of 5 children, whose identity had been usurped by his commercial and cultural career as Grande Otelo. He is a person of national artistic and cultural relevance who is constantly promulgated by his roles in theater, movies and TV to various types of readers and viewers who transmit to the artist multiple meanings and senses. I developed the character and personality of Sebastião by means of his role playing and of his cultural product, Grande Otelo, and by reviewing his fictional and real spheres and intertwining memory and history as the thread of the plot, without ignoring, however, their respective peculiarities. The research period was from 1915 to 2015. Thus, we investigated the past which led to the original existence of Grande Otelo in 1935 in order to clarify the uses and abuses of the founding processes of memory, reading and seeing Sebastião as Grande Otelo, keeping in mind the first as a shadow of the second. Starting from the disappearance of Sebastião in the role of Grande Otelo we go back to his birth in 1915 in order to express his humanization as a social subject, and establish the similarities and differences of the relationship between the distinct natures. Thus, as a historian, I availed myself of the preterit sense of memory which exacts a link between memory memory and memory habitus. I then considered myself as a mediator between the two so as to satisfy the interpretation required by a historical character, and imparted the relevant intelligibility and readability to the narrative in order to clarity the reflection of the reader. In short, through our analysis it was shown that the reality of Grande Otelo can not be transferred to that of Sebastião in order to make sense of one by means of the other, and above all that it is impossible to equate them since e point of reference for Grande Otelo is the year 1935, and that of Sebastião dates back to 1915.