Construções da historiografia alagoana sobre a escravidão um balanço crítico

Abstract

From the 1980s on, Brazilian historiography went through a process of renewal as a result of the New History, a fact that deeply impacted the studies on slavery in the country.The researches on slavery in Alagoas have also undergone changes that included new narratives, themes, sources and concepts. This paper aims to investigate critically how local historiography has constructed historical knowledge about slavery in Alagoas. To this end, we carried out a qualitative research of bibliographic review. As analysis criteria, we have observed the academic background of the authors, their institutional places of production and the times of publication, as well as each work and its respective themes, objectives, theoretical references, sources, data and case studies, arguments, central theses and others. We took as corpus of analysis the historiographical works from Alagoas, dividing them between those produced between the first half and beginning of the second half of the 20th century, and those developed after the 1980s according to an emerging historiographical renewal. The investigation made us realize that, in Alagoas, there has been an increase in the number of researches that take slavery as an object of study, but there has been a significant change in the historiographical interpretation. The first works have certain limitations such as: the collective narratives that stand out, the scarce existence of case studies, the majority access to the sources of official records, which selected narratives that sought to marginalize slaves and consequently, to enable the discourse of the slavery institution. On the other hand, in the works that correspond to the historiographical innovation, we notice that the presence of captives goes beyond the dichotomy between master and slave. In these narratives, the subjects submitted to slavery are protagonists in several social and cultural spheres, in which they practice several forms of resistance: the work of enslaved women in the streets of the cities and their social and political articulations, the work in the quilombos, the strengthening of bonds among the enslaved, the construction of kinship relations, the associations in brotherhoods, the attempts of geographical displacement in search of freedom, etc. The new constructions of historical knowledge about slavery in Alagoas are renewed through thematic variations, sources, concepts, data, case studies and interpretations that tend to value and highlight the trajectories of the captives in search of freedom, even without losing sight of the institutional ties with slavery that limited their possibilities of action.