Name: HUGO RICARDO MERLO
Publication date: 27/10/2023
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| CAMILA BUENO GREJO | Examinador Interno |
| FABIO FRANZINI | Examinador Externo |
| JOSEMAR MACHADO DE OLIVEIRA | Examinador Interno |
| JULIO CESAR BENTIVOGLIO | Presidente |
| MATEUS HENRIQUE DE FARIA PEREIRA | Examinador Externo |
Summary: This thesis comprises a history of the concept of mestiçagem (racial-cultural mixing) as a fundamental vector in Brazilian historical thinking. It also serves as a conceptual articulation of an epistemic advantage, that of discerning the contradictions and ambiguities within the very phenomenon of history itself. We argue that mestiçagem is essentially a historical concept, functioning as a formalistic category denoting origin and historical development, extending beyond its well-explored ideological and identity-based connotations in the existing literature on the subject. Additionally, we contend that it is a dialectical and processual concept, forming one of the cornerstones of Brazilian historical thinking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We accomplish this through an analysis inspired by the German tradition of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), examining selected works of literary criticism, social essays, and historiography that employ this analytical category from 1874—the year of its first appearance in national historiography—to 1942, coinciding with the publication of Formação do Brasil contemporâneo by Caio Prado Jr., the most recent text in our analytical corpus. We conclude that, even though it lost some of its explanatory potential with the decline of the concept of race and the promotion of the ideology of mestiçagem in the 1930s, the fundamental concept of mestiçagem remained relevant, as its underlying structure continued to shape Brazilian historical thought in the form of characteristic structural dualism and provisional synthetic concepts. Furthermore, we argue that the analysis of mestiçagem as an analytical concept highlights the generative potential of the Brazilian intellectual tradition and other peripheral intellectual traditions.
