Da Senzala ao Novo Horizonte: identidades culturais e a militância na imprensa negra paulista entre 1945 e 1948

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the role of the São Paulo black press in the articulation of black movements and struggles between 1945 and 1948, questioning the role of black journals and journalists in disseminating proposals and promoting debate on the configuration of cultural identities as well as on the place of black populations in the construction and composition of nationality. Prioritizing the study of the trajectories and militancy of the so-called “collaborators” of the black press who, during those years, worked in the newspapers O Novo Horizonte and Alvorada and in the magazine Senzala, it inquiries about the historical meanings of their struggles and proposals against racism and for the affirmation of social rights of black populations in the country. The text of the dissertation comprises three chapters that address the main issues analyzed. The first chapter presents and discusses the graphic and editorial projects of the three publications, as well as the articulations of black intellectuals in associative and communication networks during the first half of the last century, but especially after the end of the Estado Novo. The second one deals with the trajectory of black journalists and discusses their propositions about the place of blacks in Brazilian society, problematizing their political articulations in their own entities, their conceptions about racism and their proposals for the promotion of blacks, aiming at their economic and cultural integration to nation and national life. The third and final chapter analyzes the intervention of these periodicals in the field of disputes around the social memory of black people, highlighting the denunciations about the forms of forced deprivation imposed on Africans and their descendants and the perspectives of reviewing and re-discussing collective memory. It highlights memorial perspectives of those movements in which the themes of the image of the black mother stand out, the meanings of the May 13th and the role of abolitionists and which resonate in a social agenda with repercussions in the current struggles against structural racism and for the defense of affirmative policies such as racial quotas for university education and the mandatory teaching of African, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous cultures in primary and higher education schools