The The “Courtesians of misfortune”

the pragmatic heroicization of Henrique Dias in the pages of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute Magazine.

Abstract

In this article I intend to analyze the historical production of a black character in the pages of the magazine of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute. In its first decades, the group that placed itself as mainly responsible for writing the “official” history of Brazil in the 19th century wrote little about black people in national history. After many years of production of this operation of black absence, in a specific period, the construction of a great black hero emerges. The IHGB describes Henrique Dias – a black soldier who fought against the Dutch invasions in northeastern Brazil in the 17th century – from his most pragmatic interests, in the midst of the Paraguayan War; while also reinforcing, with two other biographies - one of an indigenous person and the other of a white man - one of the mottos of the historiographical operation proposed by Karl von Martius of a nation formed by three elements. However, the Dias described by the partners of this institution, with strong links with the Empire, in addition to seeking to convince its target audience, the imperial elite, that it would be beneficial to send black men and women to Prata; produce a heroicization of a character who, domesticating the past, becomes obedient to the Crown and a bold soldier for Brazil who fought to the end for its King; it also contributes to the continuity and justification of a necropolitics present, at least, since the Portuguese-Brazilian 15th century, that is, letting an internal “other” die and/or sending it to death in combat against an external “other”.