Nelson de Senna, historiador : Colombo do Mediterrâneo em Minas

Abstract

The figure of the faithful minister and fellow servant, aware of his duty, seems to be an image that captures and gives meaning to the extensive political-intellectual trajectory of Nelson Coelho de Senna (1876-1952). A result of both personal commitment and the opportunities built, his performance is analyzed in this thesis based on the institutions to which he belonged, on the established social bonds, as well as on the occupations and instituted practices that shape his performance as a historian. This means exploring how he built a prominent place, seeking to give visibility to his scriptural project. To do so, we analyze part of his personal collection, dedicated to the construction of the Elucidário de africanismos (Elucidations of africanisms). Given the investigative possibilities attributed to the expressive informative value, we aim to analyze the Africanisms in interface with a certain historiographical production that, at the time, established a close relationship with Philology. Concerning the research problem, we seek to demonstrate how the issue of language gained prominence in the search for the construction of philological models capable of explaining both the existence of a Brazilian antiquity linked to the Indo-European peoples and the presence of a brazilianness marked by regional specificities. The latter had important reverberations in the debates of the 1930s, a period in which a set of symbolic-discursive elements were responsible for shaping a national ideal. In this respect, we highlight the figure of an intellectual whose performance was part of a tradition and a way of making history unique to his time. To this end, we focus on the context of production and circulation of his ideas, exploring how masterful he was at taking advantage of the occasion, thus becoming an important name within Africanist studies.