Batuque of the blacks x Batuque of the whites: disputed speeches about a ‘gathering of blacks’ in the town of São Salvador de Campos dos Goytacazes, in the year 1831

Abstract

The threat of a slave rebellion was a subject of constant concern for the seigneurial class throughout the nineteenth century. In the year 1831, in the section of letters from the reads of Correio Constitucional Campista, in the town of São Salvador de Campos dos Goytacazes, a controversy was established between two subscribers of the newspaper on the meaning of a “gathering of blacks” in one of the parishes of the city. Based on a historiographical approach that conceives the slave as a social agent and the French Analysis Discourse, the objective of this article is to problematize the liberal discursive formation that grounded the dispute of meanings on the slavery, being possible to infer, therefore, the meanings attributed of freedom from the position assumed by the discursive subjects in textual production.