Entre Sertão e Brejo, entre o tradicional e o moderno: identidades e representações em A Bagaceira de José Américo de Almeida.

Abstract

Between the mid-nineteenth century to the fírst decades o f the twentieth century the question o f organizing narratively Brazilian nation has been carried out by several intellectuals, by different interpretive matrices. However, most of them identified in the coexistence of the explanatory matrix based on criteria o f race, climate and geographical environment, going in line with the scientistic theses prevailing at the time. In contrast, írom the mid-1920s the regional issue resurfaces in füll nationalist euphoria. The literary work A Bagaceira of the José Américo de Almeida is here seized in its historical character, reflecting the author’s intention to explain the regional issue by taking arguments based on scientific culture then. It is noteworthy that our author, corroborating with the spirit o f his time, chose dualism geographic and interpretive mechanism, opposing the spatiality o f the backwoods and swamps in an attempt to characterize the regional territoriality. We then realize that the author relies on a strategy of discourse centralized nation-state to conjecture their particular regional construction, which will be the starting point o f a whole image-discursive form the basis for the production of so-called regionalist "novelists thirty”, which will be the main actors in the spatial delimitation of Northeast Brazil. In this sense, we can understand the cultural tensions that permeate production americista clearly an intellectual between two worlds, between the traditional and the modem.