Tobias Barreto at the forefront of dissent: understanding the formation of national identity in 19th-century Brazil

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of nineteenth-century Brazil’s national identity in Tobias Barreto’s thought, situating it within the formation of Brazilian constitutional thought, given that national identity is a key constitutional criterion for protecting cultural rights in Brazil. It discusses Brazilian nation-building as the foundation of national identity and presents the intellectual and political context of nineteenth-century Brazil, marked by the prominence of ideas imported from France and by the counter-current movement led by Barreto and the Recife School. It then analyses Barreto’s proposal for distinctively domestic political, economic and social models tailored to Brazilian realities. Based on bibliographical and documentary sources, the study adopts a qualitative approach grounded in deductive and critical methods, with a descriptive objective and basic research nature. It concludes by elucidating the innovative and controversial character of Barreto’s thought, insofar as his theorisation of national identity, while still in an embryonic process of definition, already entailed conceiving Indigenous peoples and Black populations as integral components of this cultural profusion, at a time when the slave system remained in force.