À sombra de Monteiro Lobato: racismo e eugenia nas terras do Sítio do Picapau Amarelo

Abstract

The present master's dissertation proposes to analyze the eugenic activism of the writer Monteiro Lobato through a literary novel entitled O Choque da Raças or O Presidente Negro: um romance american no ano de 2228, published in 1926 by Editora Companhia Nacional. To this end, I carry out a debate involving the feeling of nostalgia and admiration of those who write about the life and intellectual trajectory of Monteiro Lobato with tendencies to narrate stories full of feelings, emotions and passions that favor the construction of a playful past, protagonist, extraordinary and mythological character of such a writer, thus interdicting questions and a more critical view of his past when his name involves race, racism and eugenics. In a second moment, I discuss Monteiro Lobato's participation in the Brazilian sanitary movement as doors that opened to meet the then eugenicist Renato Kehl. In the third chapter, in turn, I discuss the year of publication of the novel in order to understand the ideological and marketing pretensions with the publication of the book and, in addition, I discuss a particular conception of eugenics based in the United States as a solution to the Brazilian racial dilemma by Monteiro Lobato. As it is a literary source, I mobilize a series of authors who discuss the relationship between History and Literature, fiction and reality, since books and texts are built from ideas, debates, places, networks and thoughts of the author himself author.