História e Verdade(s), vol. 23

MARÇAL MENEZES PAREDES
Brazilian nationality and the modern project: between the incorporation of difference and the introjections of guilt.

This work talks about a perplexity manifested for the modernity project - witch means a process founded in a faith on power of the reason to emancipate peoples and in a progress of the science - just in a moment of his adaptation in Brazil. For that, we intend to identificate this phenomenon to focus on, particularity, the case of Euclides da Cunha, writer of Os Sertões, as an expression of the whole intellectual complexity, resulting from the challenge that the Brazilian case means to modern project. Beyond that, we consider his perspective, because of his tensional way to organize the knowledge of rustic Brazilian, as an author of a nuclear speech in a search of a Brazilian national identity.
What we intent to perceive is, exactly, the critical knot formed when the toes of a discursive tissue face with a difference. That means to get clear how the questioning of collective identity is manipulates by the lights of modern theoric manantial that demands to him cohesion and univocity. After that, it's important to reflect about the complex relationship between identity and temporality, once identity is (for search perenity in the aspects sayed "essential" of a people) glued to the idea of a mythical temporality. In this hand, at the expense of the idea of preservation of the "essence" of a Self-collective in through the time, we try to dislocate the questioning of national identity, through the aesthetic experience present in a euclidian masterpiece.