A representação do negro na Revista Fon-fon! : imagens, humor e estereótipos (1908-1914)

Abstract

This is a completion work of the full degree course in History, at the Federal University of Sergipe. In this analysis, we will focus on the forms of representation of black people in Fon-fon! seeking to establish an understanding of the symbolic universe that these representations carry in the post-abolition period. The period we understand as post-abolition is delimited between the years 1888-1937, thus using a time frame based on the work Negros e Política, by Flavio dos Santos Gomes. For the author, this period is crucial for understanding the meanings of freedom, citizenship and autonomy for the black population. The dehumanization processes to which black people were subjected go beyond the limits between the 16th and 19th centuries, where enslavement lasted. Even after the end of slavery, it is possible to observe re-updates of the dehumanization processes, which continued to be imposed on the black population. Among these processes, we can mention; the exclusion of basic rights (education, health, security, housing), the maintenance of an excluding economic structure, which only allowed them access to underemployment and low-skilled manual work, as well as, through urban planning with a hygienist character, maintained the black population moved away from the central regions of large cities, pushing them to peripheral areas without any structure and access to State services. In addition, a political project was in vogue for the black population, whose aim was to whiten this population, an extermination directed at the traits, color and culture of black people. Thus, in this work we will seek to understand the mechanisms of this process of dehumanization of black people, which was in vogue in Brazilian society: Humor. In this context, humor becomes a reflection of racist institutions, present in the structure of power relations, in Brazilian social life. To do so, we will use a historical analysis, dialoguing with social psychology, in order to understand how humor interferes in social interactions. In this sense, we will analyze the content of Revista Fon-fon! focusing on racist elements, and degradation of the black person, of their productions. The Fon-fon! it was an important means of circulation of ideas and customs, in a society that sought to incorporate the lights of modernity. Modernity, which, so to speak, is represented in a civilizing process that denies the colonial past and, consequently, the slave order. Despite representing these modernizing ideals, Fon-fon! it actually served as a vehicle to naturalize the inferiority of black people through humorous texts and images that reinforced racist and exclusionary social structures. This work is organized in such a way as to present the initial contexts and intricacies of the discussions around our object - the universe of stereotypes and symbols that surround the representations of black people in the magazine FonFon!. That said, our research goes through the critical analysis of the literature dedicated to the subject, in the same way, it organizes a discussion around the developed concepts made to racism and, from that, establishes the methodological categories that support this analysis. In the end, we will establish an understanding of the dynamics of representation of the black person at the beginning of the Republic, based on the effort to observe and question the editions of the magazine Fon-Fon!.