Ulisses do Valle
Macunaímica Rationality: a history of the sociodicéia of Brazilian modernization
Description: This is a research that will comparatively investigate the variations of the modernization projects of the Brazilian society developed in consonance with the great critical diagnoses implemented by several sectors of its intelligence and of the intellectual classes. In parallel to the investigation of the modernization projects, the research will focus on the patterns of rationality underlying them. For the purpose of logical control, the research establishes what would be a provisional typology of historiographic/sociological discourses produced around the problem of modernizing Brazilian society. Brazilian historiography is thus divided into two phases: one that we call pre-modernist historical discourse and another that we call modernist historical discourse. The first phase is extended in a Romantic tendency, whose greatest exponents were Francisco Varhangen and Joaquim Nabuco, and in another Realist, whose greatest exponents were Euclides da Cunha and Capistrano de Abreu. The historical modernist discourse, at one time, is divided into three trends: a culturalist, whose original and more coherent expression takes shape in the works of Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda; another functionalist, which refers to the contributions of Caio Prado Júnior and Florestan Fernandes; and a third trend, which we call developmentalist-evolutionary, which is embodied in the institutional space of the ISEB and the intellectuals who gathered around it. The central object of the investigation is to observe/investigate how the Brazilian historical discourse had as its active ingredient, although often implicit, the category of modernization and how, as a result, it varied around a hierarchically biased comparison with the industrialized capitalist societies that have always been the archetype of modernizing utopias.
Brazilian modernization: from its utopias to its history
Description: This is a historical-sociological research whose thematic scope is focused on the issue, recurrent in the Brazilian social sciences, of the modernization of Brazil. The initial plan of the project is to contemplate three distinct spheres in which the theme "modernization" is highlighted: a) the artistic sphere, b) the academic sphere, and c) the socio-cultural sphere. The basic hypothesis of the research is that, on one hand, several segments of the Brazilian artistic production have not lost sight, since the week of 1922, of the theme of modernization in Brazil. On the other hand, the hypothesis is that such artistic manifestations exerted, in ways that need to be verified socio-historically, a strong influence on the academic field that discussed, in the period after 1930, the dilemmas of Brazilian modernization: more than a common theme to both spheres, we want to investigate the influx of relations between art and society on the theorization produced on the theme of modernization of Brazilian society throughout the twentieth century. Although the theme is diffuse throughout the twentieth century, the objective is to concentrate on the comparison between two specific periods that demarcate, each, a fundamental pole in the history of the debate on the modernization of Brazil. The first period, thus, is concentrated in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, in which Modernism in the arts and the so-called heritage-patriarchal heritage in academic studies on Brazil's modernization process stand out. The second period, in turn, concentrates on the 60s and 70s of the same century, when Tropicalist aesthetics, an artistic vanguard whose critical insights have not yet been incorporated into a historical-sociological reading of Brazilian society, was put on the scene.