O Novelo de Dalcídio. Mundo ribeirinho e subalternidades amazônicas no romance Belém do Grão-Pará

Abstract

This work consists in an attempt to create a dialogue between the novel Belém do Grão-Pará, by Dalcídio Jurandir, and a set of authors and studies from different areas and moments that help to understand what we identify in that book as the universe of riverside subalternities. Thus, we constitute an argumentative line with elements that, at first, would not seem interconnected, but which, at our point of view, make sense when they are stitched together as a proposal for interpreting the book. We start from an introductory discussion on the persistence of a certain type of agroextractivist peasantry in the Amazon, based on the work of Francisco de Assis Costa. Then we seek to understand the long-lasting ignorance about Amazonian biodiversity that results of the relationship between man, nature and culture, partly associating it with the process of the formation of natural sciences, with the influences of racist theories and with the constitution of social and historical invisibility of the agroextractivist peasants studied by Costa. Without this movement, based on processes of subalternizing humanities and their respective citizenships, we consider that it would not be possible to constitute an organizational pattern such as the system of "aviamento", a type of barter that was instituted since the Amazonian colonial period and is immensely important to understand the narrative context of the said novel. Finally, we try to focus on the effort to relate the literary narrative to others, using as a background the discussion about how the subalternities universe restricted to Belém do Grão-Pará also dialogues with the present capital of Pará. From excerpts involving Alfredo's arrival in Belém, we seek to discuss what we mean by “processes of subalternization”, pointing out in what way the production of differences through racialization processes are part of the capitalist mode of production since its first advances in the colonial world, as pointed out by Mbembe. In this debate, we are especially interested in the notion of archive and in the ethical imperative of thinking about the reconstitution of the history of the subalternized, also by a performative dimension, of moral imagination. The final effort was focused in understanding the unfolding of violence and hierarchization in these subordinate universes, both in relation to work and concerning the articulation between class, race and gender differences, without forgetting that, in a contingent way, alliances and solidarity are as part of it as are violence and conflicts.