The racial formation of the new man: appropriations of racial theories by anarchist militants in São Paulo, in the First Republic

• Grant number: 23/13950-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• End date: August 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Specific topics in Education
• Principal Investigator: Bruno Bontempi Júnior
• Grantee: Samira Martins
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate how anarchist activists in São Paulo, in the first decades of the Republic, appropriated racial theories to support a revolutionary racial and educational project for the working classes. The aim is to understand how human differences were perceived, culturally constructed and given new meanings by activists, to understand which habits and behaviors they aimed to instill or devalue. The main sources will be the newspapers of the anarchist press in São Paulo, between 1890 and 1930. The analysis of the results will be carried out in dialogue with the theoretical-methodological contributions of E. P. Thompson and R. Williams. I will investigate the hypothesis that anarchist militants, through their social experience in the context of a nascent capitalist industrial economy, constructed hybrid and plural interpretations of scientific-racial precepts in circulation, with which they formulated a "scientific-racial pedagogy", aimed at training of an anarchist "superior race".