“Antes do peito me arrenqueis o coração!” : representações da família escravizada na obra de Castro Alves

Abstract

Castro Alves is one of the most known poets of Brazilian romanticism in the present day. His name became a synonym for anti-slavery struggle and his activity within abolitionism, as well as the representations he made of the slaved, gave him the title of “O Poeta dos escravos”. The following work is based on Roger Chartier’s (2002a; 2002b; 2002c) concept of social representations, and concepts like Oliveira’s (2007) captivate to convince and rhetoric of change (ALONSO, 2015). Articulating these notions with Castro Alves’s work helps us to comprehend the motivation behind the social representation of the enslaved family present within these texts, and the reasons that made the poet represent that aspect of slavery the way he did. In this work it was demonstrated if the poet diverged or not from the slavery and abolitionist representations regarding the enslaved family that were present in 19th century Brazil. For that we was analyze the author’s life, the social context of slavery and the enslaved family in Imperial Brazil, as well as the rhetorical categories used by the poet to captivate his public for the abolitionist cause, maintaining a comparative analysis between the poet’s work and the social representations done by other groups of imperial society in text and speeches which endorsed or criticized slavery.