O discurso geográfico n'O Abolicionismo: contribuições à interpretação da formação territorial do Brasil

Abstract

This research is focused on the book O Abolicionismo (2011a [1883]), by the Brazilian northeastern writer Joaquim Nabuco. In this work, the author devoted special attention to the process of occupation of the Brazilian territory and economic production, both having been rooted in slavery. Substantially, the composition of the internal and external scenario of O Abolicionismo occurred, concomitantly with the absence of institutionalized social sciences in Brazil, including Geography. This condition provided literature with the task of narrating, describing, and interpreting the country's reality, whose records resulted in a set of documents that enabled the construction of geographical discourses. Based on this perspective, we reconcile these initial observations to highlight the central question of this research: What are the main geographical contributions of O Abolicionismo to the interpretation of the territorial formation of Brazil? In order to achieve satisfactory results, we set, as the main goal, the analysis of the geographical contributions of Nabuco’s book to the understanding of the Brazilian territorial formation. The adopted methodological procedures were mainly based on bibliographical and documental research. In this process, we also emphasize that the analysis of O Abolicionismo took an interpretative path of the “elements of understanding” pointed out by Candido (2000; 2006b), which guide a thorough investigation in terms of author and work, as well as external factors (also named extraliterary factors), which comprise the social and contextual conditions, and ideological influences at work in the core of the writer’s ideas. As a result of this research, it was observed that the jurist contemplated one vision of the territorial formation of Brazil, whose structure was involved by authoritarian relations under the cloak of slavery. From this perspective, the triad of monoculture, slave labor, and land ownership was perceived as the model that established the social, economical, and geographical aspects of the country. Furthermore, it was revealed that, in contemporary times, the pattern of “development” remains unchanged, maintaining the same situation of the colonial period, which keeps the population, mainly the black portion, in conditions very similar to the ones portrayed by Joaquim Nabuco in O Abolicionismo in 1883.