Que coisa é essa, Yôyô?: cor e raça na imprensa ilustrada da Bahia (1897-1904)

Abstract

From techniques such as lithography and woodcut, it was possible to create and reproduce daily images in the newspapers of the Empire and the Republic of Brazil. The purpose of this study is to make a historiographic report, derived from a multidisciplinary theoretical analysis to which several printed visual documents were selected from the newspaper A Coisa from Salvador, in Bahia. The weekly news, edited in the capital and distributed also in the countryside of Bahia by the end of 1897 and the beginning of 1904 is rich for its illustrations and the satirical, humorous and critical content, signed by its editors. The images in A Coisa are appealing for their content filled with tensions inherent to the time of the First Republic in Brazil, such as issues regarding ones skin color, phenotypes, race, gender, the value and the social ranking of the black population. The paper, in its gathering of texts and images, is the main basis of this research corpus, in which a dialogue with other papers from other places and times is proposed so that it becomes evident the historical process that marks the ideal of nation and the construction of a body and an identity for the people of African Descent in Brazil. The observation and analysis of the selected images from the newspaper allow the identification of its way of production, the orientation of a reality in function of its target consumers, their authorship and the objectives to which it was created. Therefore, this work aims to critically analyze the representations given to the black body and skin, in order to problematize the memories of these bodies and their sociocultural meanings and, thus, question, through a methodology aimed to the description and analysis of images united to texts, these bodies visual representations possible contribution to the formation of an idea of black people unified identity, and their social alterity in deference to the memories given to the white society in the historical and social context of that time.