Representações das identidades culturais em “Gupeva” e “A escrava”, de Maria Firmina dos Reis, nos jornais do século XIX

Abstract

Maria Firmina dos Reis has a diverse work in literary genres, however, her prose texts have the particularity of criticizing the social conditions that were imposed on identities different from those of the white man holding power. Therefore, the research has the general objective of analyzing the representations of cultural identities in the works “Gupeva” and “A escrava”, which were published in newspapers in the 19th century. This research corpus is made up of the versions of the serial novel “Gupeva”, which circulated in the periodicals O Jardim das Maranhenses (1861), Porto Livre (1863) and Eco da Juventude (1865) and the short story “A escrava”, which was published in Revista Maranhense (1887). To this end, the following specific objectives were adopted: a) map the publications of the narratives “Gupeva” and “A escrava” in 19th century periodicals; b) describe the editorial board of the newspapers in which such texts were published; c) examine the identities of the indigenous and white characters represented in “Gupeva” and d) analyze the representations of black, brown and white people in the short story “A escrava”. Therefore, this is a bibliographical and documentary research, which was carried out based on a dialogue between the theories of Cultural History and Cultural Studies, mainly to understand the concepts of Representation (Chartier, 2009; Hall, 2016) and of Identity (Hall, 2006, 2014; Woodward, 2014; Silva, 2014). That said, throughout the investigation the following categories will be analyzed: a) Black (Nascimento, 2021; Gonzalez, 2018; Souza, 2021; Fanon, 2020) based on an understanding of black not only as a physical body, but also in terms sociopsychological; b) Indigenous (Gonzaga, 2022; Potiguara, 2019; Krenak, 2020, 2022), considering what it means to be indigenous and the processes of colonial violence; c) Pardo (Schwarcz, 2012, Ribeiro, 2006; Carneiro, 2011) in order to understand the position and treatment towards people who were not seen as white or black, due to the miscegenation in the Brazilian constitution and d) Whiteness, (Bento , 2022; Schucman, 2014) to understand how power relations were constructed between white, black and indigenous people over the centuries. The results of the analysis demonstrate that the literature produced by Maria Firmina dos Reis not only entertained the reading public of the 19th century, but was also interested in denouncing the current slavery system, as well as highlighting the power relations that were established between peoples of origin, gender and ethnicity, even though, at times, the author reinforced certain stereotypes that also circulated in the literary works of her contemporaries.