“Dai-lhes mestres e dai-lhes officinas”: o acesso de negros livres, libertos e “sujeitos de pés descalços” à cultura letrada no Rio de Janeiro oitocentista

Abstract

In Brazilian historiography, blacks have often been assigned the place of invisibility, dependence, silence and interdiction, a condition that denied them (and still denies) the possibility of being perceived as historical subjects. In the history of education, approaches reinforced this whole tradition of discrimination and exclusion when it was intended to think about the relationship between the black population and school and non-school education, between the black population and literate culture. New research, however, has sought to overcome such approaches, recognizing blacks as subjects of educational action. In this direction, this study analyzed some possibilities of insertion of free, freed and enslaved blacks in the literate world, in order to highlight diverse experiences that provided access to reading, writing, as well as craft learning skills by the black and poor population, in the capital of the Brazilian empire. To this end, the examination of a documentary nucleus composed of journals was privileged; black fellowship commitments; reports and letters from government agencies; documents referring to school institutions, such as regulations, registration forms and nominative lists; among other historical sources. The exploration of this complex corpus was fertilized by dialogue with the bibliography of the field of the history of education and the social history of slavery in the city of Rio de Janeiro, as well as with research that converged towards the approximation of the intended objectives. When analyzing the relations between portions of the black population and the literate culture, in its various forms, it was also sought to note the meanings conferred on schooling by this part of the population, as well as to evidence measures promoted by it from the perspective of access to the codes of a schooled education, with a view to distancing the world from slavery, to the conquest or affirmation of freedom. With this, this study provides relevant contributions to the reflections on the historical construction of the educational experiences of the black population by making possible access to the universe literate by free blacks, freedmen and bare feet.