A epopeia do negro brasileiro: a produção da república dos palmares na escrita de Arthur Ramos

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of the Quilombo dos Palmares image and its leader Zumbi as heroes of freedom, black people and the Brazilian nationality. However, in the late nineteenth century the image of Quilombo was far from positive, represented everything that Brazilian intellectuals and political elites would not like that was linked to nationality. In almost a hundred years the Quilombo dos Palmares went from enemy nation to the status of national hero; ceased to be a group of Africans who impede the progress of Brazilian civilization, to be the great epic of the Brazilian black. The amount of writings that addressed this issue, has increased considerably during the twentieth century, demonstrating the importance attributed to Palmares, the intellectuals of this period. Among scholars, he was the doctor and Alagoas anthropologist Arthur Ramos, lecturer of a conference in 1938 entitled "The associative spirit of the black," and author of the chapter "The Republic of Palmares", published in 1939 in the book "The black in Brazil ". The goal, therefore, was to analyze the imaginary space, the Quilombo dos Palmares, composed by Ramos in his writings, relating to the construction of this space with the historiographical tradition of Palmares and the "scene production" in which the author was inserted. The research was conducted among field of Cultural History of Spaces and History of Historiography. The Quilombo dos Palmares was understood as imaginative space, following Edward Said collaborations focusing on symbolic or poetic meanings. To analyze the historiography, we use discourse analysis, grounded in the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, we thought of as a procedure of questioning, decomposition and re-organization of discourse. Along with the historiographical operation Michel de Certeau, enabled us to understand the mechanisms of historical writing. The writings of Arthur Ramos, were concentrated the main conclusions of a new perspective on Palmares. Professor Ramos put himself as the heir of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, continuing research on the black population in Brazil, resulting in a concentrated narrative Palmares themselves, not their conquerors. However, distanced himself from racist perspective Rodrigues, approaching the North American cultural anthropology, enabling the production of Palmares as resistance to acculturation process imposed on slaves. As productions of Pernambuco and Alagoas Institutes, mainly Jaime Altavilla and Manoel Aaron reader, knew a heroic narrative of the event, although linked to the construction of state identities. Arthur Ramos extended this discourse, to produce the Quilombo dos Palmares, according to their quality and capacity of the Brazilian Negro.