Intellectuals of underdevelopment and the idea of the Northeast: sensitive perceptions regarding poverty in the city of Recife in the mid-twentieth century

• Grant number: 23/16904-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Paulo Teixeira Iumatti
• Grantee: Fabio Silva de Souza
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (IEB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to analyze the sensitive perceptions regarding poverty formulated by a specific intellectual elite that operated within the following technical and cultural organizations in the city of Recife: Joaquim Nabuco Institute for Social Research (IJN), University of Recife (UR), Northeast Development Superintendence (Sudene), and Popular Culture Movement of Recife (MCP). Our goal is to highlight the nuances, convergences, and contrasts of the reflections that shaped the idea of the Northeast, which emerged from these spaces of intellectual sociability in the mid-20th century. The guiding hypothesis for the issues at hand is that the tragic awareness of underdevelopment, which influenced both intellectuals concerned with poverty and the actions and projects of these organizations, produced two significant outcomes. First, it gradually paved the way for a historical awareness of modernization in a peripheral context. Second, it became shared by engaged intellectuals and social movements in the late 1950s. The prosopographic approach will be the methodological solution to the challenge of analyzing the extensive documentary corpus, from various sources and typologies, produced by intellectuals of underdevelopment and the technical and cultural organizations they were part of. The result of this research will be the mapping and analysis of the intellectual trends aimed at addressing the issue of underdevelopment in the mid-20th century.