Entre o rei e o réu: atualizações, disputas e usos da memória de Pelé nas narrativas biográficas

Abstract

Pelé is one of the Brazilian personalities of whom the most talked about, wrote and filmed over the years, it is not by chance that he stands out as the most biographed Brazilian of all time. From the end of 1950s until the first decades of the 21st century, society has not stopped producing and consuming biographies, biopic, journalistic and advertising material about him. Many of these narratives about him carried national identity projects at their core, with Pelé as a symbol of Brazil miscegenated and politically and culturally victorious. On the other hand, several other narratives contest this status and begin to question its place of glory by bringing up themes such as “Dictatorship” and “Racism”, guidelines in which Pelé has historically been associated in a negative way. Thus, there was, in fact, a permanent political debate from his memory that, depending on the historical contexto, ended up taking different paths, now celebrated as “King”, demonized as “Defendant”. Therefore, this work carries out a dense historical survey of sources such as biographies, biopic, journalistic and adverstising material in order to understand these conflicts and narrative disputes that, in a broader plan, ended up becoming a debate on Nation and Identity Projects National, which had, in the football phenomenon as a whole and in the figure of the player himself, the main symbolic forces of representation and discussion of Brazilian society.