Bandeirante incendiado : emergências de sentido a partir de contestações de estátuas de tipo colonialista

Abstract

In this master thesis, we seek to understand the emergence of meanings from the images produced in the transnational phenomenon of contestation of statues linked to colonialism and racism, with particular attention to the burning of the statue of bandeirante Borba Gato in São Paulo, in 2021. We begin from the premise that the three main objections to this type of phenomenon are based, in general, on these three assertions: a) iconoclasm would be ineffective; b) the anachronism would be a historiographic error; c) violence would delegitimize insurrections. From the challenge of dealing with these three attempts to close the debate, what is produced is a heterogeneous theoretical arrangement, characterized by how Marie-José Mondzain and Bruno Latour seek to update the problematic of iconoclasm; by how Georges Didi-Huberman reads the work of Benjamin and Warburg, investigating the relationship between image and memory; by how Deleuze and Guattari think about assemblages; by the discussions about coloniality, representation, and violence developed by Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi; by how Benjamin and Fanon, once again, establish approximations between law, power, and violence. In an essayistic form, we suggest to postpone the condemnation of the images and the gestures that produce them to open up some possibility of seeing what these images show and how they do it. We conclude that, in a certain sense, the flaw is both the method and the matter of the images produced in the contestation of colonialist statues.