O negro no teatro português quinhentista

Abstract

This work intends to analyze the representation of the black character in the plays that compose the corpus of the Portuguese dramaturgy of the fifteenth century, proposing a revisitation of these texts under the perspective and assumptions of Cultural Studies, especially the theories dedicated to the colonial discourse and structural racism. Considered the golden age of the Portuguese Oversea Empire, the sixteenth century was also the moment when the Portuguese theater knew its peak, with Gil Vicente as its greatest exponent. This research seeks to verify, through the reading of the records, if and how the colonial narrative is constructed via these dramaturgical texts, trying to identify which elements of the racist discourse are used to reach this goal. It begins, at first, from a contextualization of the expansion period of the Portuguese Oversea Empire until the moment when the black man starts to integrate the Portuguese society of the sixteenth; from the Portuguese expectations at the beginning of the discovery voyages, through the first contacts in Africa and, finally, approaching enslavement and social interaction on Lusitanian soil. From the confrontation between historical speech and literary speech, one seeks an understanding of how the black man was represented in the Portuguese society of the sixteenth century, the mechanisms used in the construction of this representation, the agents involved in this process and the participation of the black himself in it. Therefore, it is expected that, at the end of the dialectical conflict between history and dramaturgy, in a marxist perspective, supplemented by theories of Cultural Studies, it becomes evident the ways in which the colonial narrative is established and justified in this dramaturgy, creating an artificial representation in which the purpose is to oppress the colonized ideologically, with the aim of keeping him eternally bound to the condition of subalternity. It is also expected to verify, from this data, if the sixteenth-century Portuguese theater operated as a kind of ideological apparatus of the State, functioning as a key factor in the circulation of racist discourse and the construction of a society organized through structural racism.