O intelectual e a cidade imaginada: Manoel Dantas e a construção de uma Natal do futuro (1900-1923)

Abstract

This research analyzes the intellectual production of Manoel Dantas about the city of Natal in the early twentieth century. Said production consists in a series of chronicles, entitled Coisas da terra, in which the author approached some aspects of the city's daily life, and in the conference, Natal d'aqui a cincoenta annos, in which he imagined some projections for the future of the state capital. We consider that, in the set of these writings, Manoel Dantas brought out images of the city of Natal in different temporalities, which were attempts to stimulate the changes that were seen as necessary by him and by the ruling group to which he was linked at that time, the Albuquerque Maranhão and the Republican Party, who were in charge of the state government. This group undertook actions aiming to make both material transformations in the city, and to construct representations about it - the latter being a domain in which Dantas made much of his contribution. We found that the writings of Manoel Dantas evoked a conception of progress, an idea that was very present in the western thought throughout the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. We observed that, in Rio Grande do Norte, as in other places in Brazil and in the western world, progress was linked to political practices and ideas such as freedom. Manoel Dantas initially associated progress with education – a link that the governors also made in their official messages. A few years later, however, we noticed that Dantas and his associates changed the discourse and started using the idea of progress in reference to the material interventions in the city of Natal executed by the republican governors, spreading the narrative that these governments represented a new era in the city's history, as opposed to the monarchic period, which appeared in the speeches as being characterized by the abandonment of the capital city. The chronicles had a pedagogical character and sought to diagnose problems that Dantas observed in the city and instruct readers to adopt new habits compatible with a modern city. The conference serves as an example of a utopian thought, since it created the image of a perfect Natal in the future, which would have solved all the problems of the city of the present, but that was conditioned to the continuity of the republicans' political project.