Cristiano Pereira Alencar Arrais

Capital cities and urban modernity: the transit of cultural models in the construction of Goiânia

The following project intends to contribute to the debate on the forms of articulation and mobilization of the experience of time in contemporary societies. The concrete locus to which its attentions converge is located at a specific moment in the history of Brazilian urbanization: the construction of the city of Goiânia and its urban development between the 1930s and 1960s. This dual orientation is fully justified by the possibility, through the exploration of certain events, to identify certain tensions between the horizon of expectation of a society and its field of experience. The construction of Goiânia appears in this context as a privileged event due to the recurrence of the rupture between time, one considered as "old", and another, understood as "new", that can be found in the historiography about this event. This theme can also be found in much of the documentation of the period that sustains a dichotomous perspective between old and modern urbanistic conceptions that, on the other hand, would be able to shape the very forms of sociability in that new space. At the same time, this project addresses its concerns for the understanding of that phenomenon in its historicity. In other words, this project seeks to think about the process of the construction of the capital of Goiás from its articulations with other similar urban experiences that have taken place in the Brazilian hinterland since the end of the 19th century, like the construction of Belo Horizonte to be the new capital of the state of Minas Gerais and the construction of Brasília to serve as the new administrative headquarters for the country. In that way, when analyzing the process of construction of Goiânia, it is intended to give priority to the procedures of classification of that urban space, in a way that, over time, certain representations about the city were constructed, taking as reference the relation between its planners and the previous Brazilian urban experiences (in particular, Belo Horizonte) and the expectation horizon that formed from the implementation of the proposed transfer of the federal capital in the mid - 1950s. By opting for a comparative analysis that privileges the synchronic and diachronic elements of those processes, the time frame seeks to take the capital of Goiás as the center of its analysis, thinking it as the fundamental link to think of the transfer of models and cultural and political appropriations that guide the Brazilian urbanistic thinking throughout the 20th century.

 

History, memory and historiography in the 19th century (XIX)

The historiography of Goiás, as a representation of the past, inherited a decadent perception from the mining crisis that eventually elided the notion of experience of the subjects involved in the confrontation of their own time. Such a perception was typical of nineteenth-century Brazilian historiography that sought to remove the intelligibility reigning in colonial society, redefining the meaning of the relationship between the subjects and the Portuguese crown. From that moment on, the past was perceived by a negative bias, only emphasizing the predatory action of the metropolis in the exploration of the territory of Goiás. This same expedient outlined the intelligibility of the region. From this perception, within the context of memory and regional history, the research project presented here aims to: a) Examine the writings (of historians and memorialists) produced after the proclamation of the republic. B) Locate, identify and analyze the traces left by the 18th century society in Goiás. In this case, it is intended to advance the examination of vestiges that are practically unknown by the historiography of Goiás and the reclassification of the colonial experience in Goiás. C) To relate the ordination of the regional representations with the formation of a tradition of writing of the nineteenth century national history. D) To analyze the negotiation between memory and history in the elaboration of a republican historical writing especially in the regional scope.