The writings of (and on) Raízes do Brasil: possibilities and challenges to the history of historiography

Abstract

This work presents itself as an attempt – a word that in the German language, Versuch, also means essay– to identify, through a historiographical debate with some of the recent criticisms of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil, the modulations of historicity of writing and historical discipline itself in the first half of the twentieth century in Brazil. The guiding line of our reasoning is the hypothesis that the writing of that history, set by the essay as form, brings, in the work itself, implications that reveal peculiarities of the national context. Among these peculiarities, we find the emblematic issue that the author becomes a kind of “bridge-author” of these modulations after the publication of the essay in 1936. Thus, in addition to identifying how the readings and re-readings of the book change vis-à-vis the changes in the historiographical perspectives, we draw out, as part of a broader research, the way it morphs itself structurally, in a challenging and living process of writing and rewriting.