Senzala: uma memória indesejada

Abstract

This academic dissertation prepared in the Architecture and Urbanism Post-Graduate Program at Federal University of Bahia (PPG-AU UFBA), supervised by Dra. Gabriela Leandro Pereira, was developed from a literature review and discusses the memory of slave quarters within the field of preservation of cultural goods, taking as the main case study the Inventário de Proteção do Acervo Cultural da Bahia (Protection Registry of the Cultural Collection of Bahia), known as Inventário IPAC-SIC, published from 1975 to 2002, in seven volumes. We had access to a digital copy of this historical document records through the Institute of Artistic and Cultural Heritage of the State of Bahia (IPAC-BAHIA), and so we searched as to identify records of slave quarters and two-story houses’ floors with slave prison functions. We were able to identify 21 cataloged files of other architectural goods built within the slavery economy, and which presented information fragments about these analyzed goods. We prioritize the collaboration of black authors and racial issues in the history of Brazilian architecture, in order to deepen this research. We also tried to establish a political place for the slave quarters, which we define as a type of historical architecture for the confinement of Brazilian slavery. We worked with three analysis categories: erasure, distortion and romanticization. We question the expression “slave housing” (and other ramifications) commonly used by national historiography to characterize slave quarters. We comprehend the memory of slave quarters through a collective bias, implied by the myth of racial democracy, and by the concepts of epistemicide, necromemory and Institutional Racism. We revisit the case of Engenho Massangana (Massangana Sugar Plantation), in Pernambuco, studied by the author in her undergraduate thesis, which increased our interest in the subject, in 2017, and which helps us to start the discussion by taking the State of Bahia as a spatial focus. Finally, we discuss how the slave quarters memory remains unwanted mainly by the institutions that safeguard cultural goods in the country.