O discurso geográfico no livro Os Sertões: as contribuições para a interpretação da formação territorial do Brasil

Abstract

The analysis between space and society, based on the relationship between the people and their territory, was an existing problem in Brazilian literature in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Interpreting the economic, political, and cultural life of the country became the goal of several intellectuals, allowing not only the formation of a feeling of nationality, but also a representation of the territory and its population, during the conjunctural process experienced by the country at that time. Among the many outstanding works of the period, Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) written by Euclides da Cunha stands out. Considered one of the main authors of Brazilian literature, Euclides, in portraying the facts of the War of Canudos, which broke out in the interior of Bahia in 1896, exposes not only the context of the civil war that broke out in Canudos, but also an unknown hinterland disintegrated from the rest of the national space. Divided into three parts, The Land, The Man and the Struggle, the book, Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), established a perspective of historical and geographical knowledge that was able to contribute to the opening of a path that enables the reading of Brazil. These observations introduce the central question of this research: What are the main geographical contributions of the book Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) written by Euclides da Cunha, to the interpretation of the territorial formation of Brazil? Based on this guiding question, our central objective is to analyze the main geographical contributions of the book Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) written by Euclides da Cunha for the interpretation of the territorial formation of Brazil. For this purpose, we start from the theoretical understanding that geographic knowledge, as a form of interpretation of the history of man in the occupation of space, can be seen in various ideologies and discourses that emerge in various spheres of understanding, such as: the academic, the literary, the political discourses, the essayistic and/or travel reports. In view of this, we witness in the literature of this period the debate of the representations about the territory and the Brazilian society, allowing them to be interpreted as geographical discourses, since they played a social role and consisted in manifesting the dynamics present in the context responsible for delimiting and defining territory and people. The methodological procedure was carried out through the elements of understanding the work and a critical analysis of the discourse present in the book. Therefore, the research allowed the construction of a perception of the geographic discourse in Euclides da Cunha, through the book Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), and how this discourse triggered a thought on the spatial representation of the territory of Brazil.