Representing National Culture, Values and Identity in the Brazilian Television Mini-series

Abstract

The telenovela is a significant indicator of social and cultural representation on Brazilian nightly television. In this context, however, representations of Brazil are not entirely limited to the telenovela, but incorporate other devices that represent a broader spectrum of Brazil’s diverse societies and cultures. In this article, I discuss how the Brazilian television mini-series provides such a unique and unacknowledged ambit, reflecting discernible continuities and changes in Brazilian national cultures, values and identities. The concept of hybridity forms a theoretical framework for the following discussions. Methodologically, I relate data from textual, press and interview analyses to the research question and discuss how this reveals additional discourses of representation. As a result, the mini-series, rather than implicitly mirroring the production and viewing characteristics of the telenovela, explicitly engages with pedagogical devices such as imagination, perception and (un)familiarity, greatly expanding Brazilian television’s social-cultural representations of Brazil.