“O Rio está transformado num Zungu”: produção discursiva sobre modernidade na cidade do Rio de Janeiro na virada do século XX

Abstract

In this thesis, I radically anchor myself in the concept of language-intervention (Rocha, 2006), understanding that every word spoken, written, or silenced fabricates ways of life and defines what can or cannot exist. Thus, I investigate how language sustains the modernity project and its main strength: that of making a single way of living, thinking, and organizing reality seem natural. I take experience (Larrosa, 2002) as a field of dispute: between what is lived and what is calculated, between the body that feels and the subject that is measured. Modernity, by instigating the disenchantment of the world (Weber, 2004), also produces disenchanted subjectivities that live according to metrics and seek to impose their rationality on everyone. Using Cartographic Discourse Analysis, I examine 22 articles published between 1890 and 1919 in Rio de Janeiro newspapers—Correio da Manhã, Jornal do Brasil, A Noite, Gazeta de Notícias, and O Paiz. Through the operations of designation, naming, adjectivation, and explanation, I observe how journalistic discourse fabricates a new discursive memory of the city, in which the old Rio-Zungu, multifaceted and traversed by healing practices and orality, is progressively replaced by a Rio-Paris, neat, linear, and white. I also highlight the constituent discourses (Maingueneau, 2016) and discursive genres (Bakhtin, 2016) as operators of rationality and devices of subjectivation. In dialogue with Sueli Carneiro (2005), Nego Bispo (2023), Césaire (2006), hooks (1994), Evaristo (2019), (Oyěwùmí, 2021) and Rolnik (2019), I recognize in decolonial and countercolonial perspectives the cracks through which the world can be re-enchanted. This is, therefore, a thesis on language, experience and power: a journey through the River, where the Zungu still pulsates beneath the rubble of city and memory