Os livros didáticos de Geografia e o pensamento racialista brasileiro na formulação da identidade nacional durante a Primeira República

Abstract

The Brazilian national identity is a theme that intends researchers to investigate its formulation through the historical path of consolidation of what was territorially delimited as Brazil. The history of the Brazilian territory contributes significantly to this thinking, which transits between geographic, cultural, scientific and racial aspects, considering that, starting from an exploratory relationship between colony and metropolis, the relationships that were formulated and reformulated, on this side of the Atlantic , graphs a model of organization that expresses such structures in a hierarchical and oppressive model. From this contact between the European and American continents marked by the colonization experience, which was fundamentally based on the exploitation of land and the slave system, it ended up outlining in Brazil, as a nation-state, central aspects in social relations, as well as in the institutions. Thus, this colonial relationship traced geo-historically, in the Brazilian reality, obstacles that, responding to a national project, aimed to homogenize social models and standards through scientific answers and theses, a project that intensified throughout the First Republic. Race, in this historical scenario of the "new times of modernity", presented as a possibility for a nation to "think and develop", since, through biological, anthropological and geographical explanations, determining the trend traits as "degenerating" and "backward" that can be avoided or erased from society, materially and symbolically. In this sense, this research aims to investigate the relationship between racialist theories, in vogue in the First Republic in Brazil and its relationship with School Geography in the construction of national identity, a work that was tracked through investigation with textbooks, classified as a source and object of research. Geography, as a school subject, presented, through textbooks of the period, relevant contributions in the construction of these discourses that hierarchized races, starting from discussions about space to develop a symbolic glorification of the European continent and phenotypic of white populations in contrast to the depreciation of the African continent and the aesthetic, cultural, religious and phenotypic aspects of black populations. The Brazilian national identity, therefore, was formulated between 1889 and 1930, from a complex plot that involves the historical course of Brazil as a nation-state, Geography as a school subject and racialist theories that were guided by the hierarchical bias of colonial western society.