Le « pretuguês », la langue maternelle et les discours fondateurs de la brésilianité

Abstract

The discourse of racial democracy, among the founding discourses of Brazilianity, produces an iconography of black women in which the image of the black mother is central, an example of racial integration and harmony. When Gonzalez (1984) proposes a pioneering analysis of the twin phenomenon of racism and sexism in Brazil, discussing the controversial black mother as a construction that is part of the Brazilian cultural neurosis, she sees her as a figure of resistance. One of the fundamental elements of this construction is that of the mother tongue, which Gonzalez, in a gesture that is both theoretical and political, calls “pretugais”, considering that the “Mãe Preta” (Black Mother), as a “subject supposed to know”, produced the Africanization of the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and of Brazilian culture itself (Gonzalez 1981). Thus, this author challenges the way Portuguese is understood as a mother tongue and its place in the processes of subjectivation from the maternal function exercised by black women. In other words, in the historicity of meanings marked by stereotyping, silencing and invisibilizing, the founding discourses return in the struggles for places of enunciation of and for black women—the object of our analysis, which proposes to discuss how these struggles of interpretation and enunciation of oneself constitute black women as subjects at the crossroads of memories, producing disputes around the narratives and interpretations about Brazil.

Keywords

• place of enunciation
• founding discourse
• brazilianity
• black feminism
• motherhood
• pretuguês