De "res" a "persona", vozes e silêncio: a categorização dos negros na legislação brasileira em perspectiva dialógica do discurso

Abstract

This dissertation examines the tension between inequality and racial equality in the historicization of Brazil from a discursive perspective. The study draws from the legal field normative texts that have governed and govern social relations from Colonial Brazil to the present day. In these texts, we trace the ways in which blacks are symbolized in language, in relation to the geopolitical categories of the territory and the experiential domains activated. In dialogic time, from the communicative chain of legal norms studied, a discursive dynamic emerges that steers the collective memory around racial tensions, whose perspective is gradually changed from a memory about the black to a memory also of the black. Based on the premise that there is no split between language and world, this dissertation articulates two theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, the historical-social dimension is mobilized through Bakhtinian studies, especially the Dialogical Discourse Analysis studies. On the other hand, the sociocognitive dimension is treated through the bias of Cognitive Linguistics. By integrating these approaches, we describe how the linguistic process through which black participants in the history of Brazil have been categorized in national legislation, in the experience of three domains - labor, religion and militancy - continues to update tensions that constitute a certain collective memory of their participation in the construction of the so-called brazilianness. Methodologically, the study starts from Federal Law 12.288/2010, which established the Statute of Racial Equality, and goes back non-linearly to the Philippine Ordinances (Book V) of 1603 in order to access the discourses that focus on racial tensions. The sociocultural conditions that delineate the structuring values of the field and its texts about black people at different moments in brazilian history are analyzed. The selected legal texts identify and describe the processes of categorizing black people and the enunciativediscursive processes through which the tension between the discourses of racial inequality and equality constitute a certain collective memory about these peoples and their participation in Brazilian culture. Finally, from the lexical clues identified in the chosen collection of domestic legislation, in the mentioned experiential domains, such as “escravos”, “negros”, “elemento servil”, “libertos”, “pretos forros”, “escravos de Guiné”, “cativos”, “réo escravo”, “cabeça de escravo importado”, “pirataria de escravos”, “tráfico de africanos”, “escravo inválido”, “vadio”, “capoeira”, “objeto de usufruto da coroa”, “afro-brasileiros”, “afrodescendentes”, etc., it is possible to see how the allusion to the black activates social cognitive processes both in those who produce it and in those who mobilize it. In this way, it mirrors historically conflicting values that reverberate in the laws until today and float the black man from the category of thing to person. This dissertation brings two interrelated contributions. Theoretically, it presents the descriptive-analytical scope of the articulation of a social-historical approach with a sociocognitive approach to language. From the meeting of these two approaches, a device emerges that meets the challenge of investigating how interactional contexts affect the functioning of language. Socially, the investigation contributes to the understanding of the discursive path through which blacks, in the historicization of Brazil, have integrated society, from an absolutely subaltern enunciative condition, when they are reified, to a condition of discursive subject that participates in the construction of legal norms.