“Heráldica da cultura popular”: Ariano Suassuna e a fabricação do movimento armorial (1950-1970)

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the historical construction of the Armorial Movement in Pernambuco, through its main founder and organizer, Ariano Suassuna, between 1950 and 1970. Launched on October 18, 1970, in Recife, the Movement, with expressions in art, literature, poetry and music, tried to create an erudite Brazilian art based on popular roots. With this, the cultural organization set out to create a high standard of literature and art, seeking full beauty and national meaning. This research seeks to understand the Armorial Movement as an invention, given that the aesthetic organization was the result of legitimized discourses and Ariano Suassuna's political, cultural and intellectual engagements. A historical analysis of his participation in the Student Theatre of Pernambuco (TEP), the Popular Theatre of the Northeast (TPN), the Popular Culture Movement (MCP), as Director of the Department of Cultural Extension at the Federal University of Pernambuco, and as a member of the Federal Council of Culture (CFC), will be essential to understanding his inclinations towards safeguarding popular culture in the Northeast and Brazil. Understanding the death of Ariano's father, João Suassuna, during the 1930 Revolution, as well as studying the clashes between Ariano Suassuna and his former Aesthetics students will also be fundamental to understanding the making of the Armorial Movement. Using sources such as interviews, newspapers, magazines, bulletins, minutes, manifestos and academic dissertations, with the support of Cultural History and concepts such as social place, practices and representations and invention, by Michel de Certeau (2012), Roger Chartier (2004) and Durval Muniz (2011), respectively, and in categories such as the writing of the self, by Michel de Foucault, the aim is to understand, based on Ariano Suassuna's political-artistic-cultural trajectory, how this movement emerged historically and what historical conditions made its fabrication possible.