POETRY, POWER AND ENDURANCE: THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF CANTORIA IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL AND ETHNIC-RACIAL RELATIONS OF THE NORTHEAST BETWEEN THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH

• Grant number: 22/02712-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): April 01, 2023
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Francisco Claudio Alves Marques
• Grantee: Gustavo Henrique Alves de Lima
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In this research we intend to discuss the process of collecting artifacts from Brazilian popular culture, more specifically from the Cantoria practiced in the Brazilian Northeast between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, carried out by black, white and supposedly mestizo singers, carried out by folklorists who stood out in the context of the Brazilian folkloric movement and who saw literature as a way of accessing the understanding of the Brazilian "national character". This research must take place in two stages: in the first one, we intend to discuss the poetic collections carried out by folklorists of the Escola do Recife, such as Silvio Romero, who, under the sign of "miscegenation" and "acculturation", in a kind of "praise of domination", collected fragments of the Brazilian popular poetry ideologically aligned with the evolutionary ideas and racial theories in vogue at the end of the 19th century; Along the same lines, entering the 20th century, we will focus on the poetic collections carried out by folklorists such as Leonardo Mota, Gustavo Barroso and Luís da Câmara Cascudo, who, ideologically aligned with the intellectual-scientists of the late 19th century, organized collections of popular poetry from the Northeast, under the sign of miscegenation and ideas disseminated within the scope of the Escola do Recife. In the second stage, we will emphasize the analysis of the poetic collections of these folklorists, focusing on the songs and fights carried out by black, white and supposedly mestizo singers, in order to clarify the historical and sociocultural determinants that guided the social and ethnic-racial relations established. in the context of the struggles that took place in the Northeast after Independence and in the context of slavery. On the one hand, in the exercise of this game, white and mestizo singers, equipped with cultural capital - tradition and expertise in the art of improvisation - and symbolic - social status and alleged ethnic superiority - try to demobilize the (black) adversary using representations that they range from insult to physical and moral depreciation, erecting a kind of dam to their social ascension and the recognition of their poetic abilities. On the other hand, black singers who resist using the same poetic weapons of the adversary in order to reverse the harmful effects of power and symbolic violence arbitrarily exercised in poetic interlocution and, by extension, in the context of northeastern society.