Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: HUGO PEDRO SILVA DOS SANTOS

NARRATIVES OF THE SUN: (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF THE HINTERLAND IDENTITY IN STATEMENTS BY MASTERS OF POPULAR CULTURE

Utterance. Identity. Hinterland. Popular culture.

The hinterland/Northeast was invented from a hegemonic discursive matrix that implies to the territory a series of images and archives of social memory that refer to drought, extreme poverty, inclemency of space and, as an essential consequence, to the withdrawal and the exodus. A large part of such socio-territorial, cultural and historical aspects were established through a hegemonic discursive matrix that brought together discursive processes in different spheres of human activity. Among the spheres that contributed decisively to the invention of the Northeast/sertão, we can highlight the artistic-cultural sphere, especially with regard to what was called northeastern regionalism, a concept that defines the culture of the territory as traditional, archaic and mythical, corroborating for the consolidation of a supposedly essential identity for the space and its people. This time, the objective of this work is to understand how the identity of the sertão is discursively (re)constructed in statements by masters of popular/regionalist culture from the city of Piranhas/AL, state of Alagoas. That is, I intend to understand what world of meanings are present in oral statements by masters of regionalist popular culture from Piranha and what are the semantic and identity implications for the territory. For this, I take as a corpus/materiality of studies, utterances of masters of the regionalist popular culture of Piranhas/AL generated in "controlled conversations" carried out with subjects recognized regionally as masters of the regional culture of cultural manifestations such as the Samba from Tebei, Reisado, Armorial Group from Piranhas/AL and Xaxado from the city located in the high hinterland of Alagoas. I am epistemologically affiliated with the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Applied Linguistics with an indisciplinary basis, an area oflinguistic-discursive studies based on the concern to elaborate intelligibility about contemporary social life, the research is also anchored in the interpretivist epistemological paradigm, understood and modulated here, to the in the light of Bakhtinian studies, such as ethnolinguistics of living speech, which provides apparatus and theoretical-methodological subsidies for a discursive reading of the aforementioned materiality. Understanding the corpus of the research as complex, during the course of the investigation, knowledge from different areas of knowledge is mobilized, such as History, Geography, Linguistics, Cultural and Identity Studies, referring to Albuquerque Jr. (2011, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2020), Bakhtin (2011, 2015, 2018), Volochinov (2017, 2018, 2019), Moita Lopes (2006, 2009, 2020), Signorini (1998), Hall (2006) ), among others. The results point, in a preliminary way, to the identity construction of the sertão through the overlapping of two fundamental questions, culture and nature, so that the statements of the masters of popular culture point to the construction of the territory as inclement, the sun being a striking symbol for the construction of such an aspect. Given the above, the results also indicate that the statements of the research subjects dialogue in a decisive way with the hegemonic discursive matrix about the territory, forming what we can metaphorically call narratives of the sun.