Notas sobre história única, racismo e o silenciamento das experiências negras em Pioneiros (1954) de Basileu Toledo França

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate how socio-racial relations between black and white people are represented in Basileu Toledo França’s Pioneiros (1954). This book was written in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, it is a product of its time. It reports the occupation process of the current southwest region of Goiás by non-indigenous people in the nineteenth century. By inventing the cultural universe of the city of Jataí in the 1800s, França (1954) forged social representations that, although aspiring to universality, were determined by his own interests, and which have been legitimized, almost uncontestedly, by various institutional spaces. We argue that Pioneiros (1954) is the synthesis of a single story (ADICHIE, 2019). Forging and legitimizing a single story for the black population requires multiple, continuous, and repetitive processes permeated by different manifestations of racism. Thus, the single story is subject to historicity. Throughout this thesis, we discuss the dangers of appropriating a single story like the one under analysis, which reinforces the silencing of black people experiences in Jataí. Finally, we explore the reception of this narrative and evidence that, by legitimizing it without critical density, some authors have been reinforcing racist perspectives in Brazilian national history, perpetrating a single story for the black population of Jataí. This thesis allows us to think about racism historicity and its manifestations in the stories that forge and shape places.