Comparative Political Thought: A study about Brazil

The effort to understand the role of Brazilian intellectuals and their contributions to think Brazil goes back a long way. Beyond national borders, the study of Brazilian political thought is a consolidated and diversified field, but it currently faces the challenge of increasing its methodological transparency, enabling the reproducibility of procedures and renewing themes, problems and the interest of young researchers on the subject. The "Brazilian social-political imagination" (SANTOS, 1967) is formed, at the same time, by visions of the past, representations of the present and future projects for the country. Therefore, we believe it is important to investigate which visions of the Brazilian nation were originally constructed by black thinkers, but are still overshadowed or ignored by an intellectual elite. In this sense, we are interested in investigating what are the characteristics of the political thought of the Black-Brazilian intelligentsia in the second half of the 20th century? The research universe includes self-declared black intellectuals who wrote texts about Brazil beginning in 1950, electing race as one of the keys to interpretation. The time frame, 1950 onwards, is justified because it is from this time on that the so-called myth of racial democracy in Brazil was institutionally questioned, enabling the attempt to elaborate alternatives to the language of mestizaje and syncretism, hegemonic in the country, which acted as a device that overshadowed the implicit and explicit racism in Brazil (ALBERTO, 2017); (NERI, 2018). To this end, we will use seven categories of analysis drawn from the work of Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent (2013), to understand the political thought of Black-Brazilian intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century. These are: (i) How did the authors classify and value social phenomena? (ii) What supports were granted or denied to political entities? (iii) How did they position themselves in defence of peace or conflict in their time? (iv) What collective plans and visions of good society or for communal purposes did they defend in their writings? (v) What were their hierarchizations and prioritizations? (vi) How does the rhetoric present itself? (vii) What ventures did they defend to justify the control of social activities? In dialogue with the History of Ideas proposed by Mark Bevir (2008), we will use interpretation modelling (Beckstein; Weber, 2022) in particular, the Oxford Model of analysis (content-centred) for data generation and Critical Hermeneutics for understanding. Next, we will employ the guidelines of Comparative Political Thought to jointly analyze the thought of the authors Clóvis Moura, Abdias Nascimento, Lélia Gonzalez and Beatriz Nascimento, chosen from the prosopographical method, which indicated that these are the thinkers who compose the matrix of Black-Brazilian political thought. We hope that, as a whole, the analyses proposed for this article may contribute to the enrichment of the racial debate and its centrality to the understanding of current Brazilian politics, as well as contribute to the growing methodological debate for research in Political Theory.