A disputa em torno da personagem Lobatiana a partir de sua inserção nos acervos do Programa Nacional Biblioteca da Escola

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the interpretations at the media for the accusations of racism about the character Aunt Nastasya, from “The Yellow Woodpecker's Ranch”, Monteiro Lobato’s children’s literature collection. The collection integrates the literary archives of the “Programa Nacional Biblioteca da Escola” (PNBE) - a national Brazilian library policy for public schools, whose criteria for the selection of the books reject the presence of stereotypes and prejudices in the narratives. For this, we analysed the antagonistic discourses produced by two participant groups set up around the issue - intellectuals of the Black Movement that opposed the hegemonic ones, especially those seen as experts in Lobato's biography and work -, moving the concepts of “race” and “racism” in the archives of the Brazilian national memory. The corpus of this work constitutes the selection of nine (09) interviews on radio or television programs from different broadcasters, given by the participants of both groups, which were collected from Youtube to perform the transcriptions and the subsequent analysis. The interviews chosen for our analyses were collected between the years 2010 to 2013, period in which the debate took extensive impact on the discursive scenario. During the analysis of the interviews, we used two theoretical and methodological frameworks: the Filed Theory of Pierre Bourdieu and the Critical Discourse Analysis of Norman Fairclough. Through a careful analysis, it was possible to think about the perpetuation of the literary canons, the “voices heard” versus the “muted ones” within the collections, proposing a debate on the role that a national public policy, like the PNBE, has at the selection and authorization of discourses that are crossed by the racist ideology of the country.