Military Dictatorship and the ethical-political turn: the bodies silenced by the MPB's dominant discourse

Abstract

The canonical historiography on the Military Dictatorship, typically from the Brazilian Southeast region, adopts a geopolitically situated and supposedly neutral approach by emphasizing the persecutions and resistance experienced by groups such as students, teachers, intellectuals, and artists, predominantly from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It often neglected the regime's impact on the daily lives of black and queer people living on the outskirts of big cities, rural dwellers in the most impoverished regions, such as the Northeast, indigenous communities and quilombolas. Historiography of music influenced by MPB often reflects the perspective of a white, male, cis person from a specific social class, relegating dissident bodies to a place of subalternity. In this article we reflect on this issue based on the production of the so-called Pessoal do Ceará. we mobilize the concept of transmodernity, from Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel and Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez. We believe that approaching the subject from the perspective of decolonial thinking serves as a provocation that intends to enrich our agenda of problems relating to the fields of History Theory and the History of Historiography.