DARIO CINTRA DE NEGREIROS RIBEIRO

This Thesis took a mistake as its starting point: the exclusion, in a certain tradition of Brazilian thought, of the participation of enslaved people in the formation of national ideological life. After reconstructing the bibliographical path that produced this exclusion – going through texts by Caio Prado Jr., Maria S. de C. Franco and Roberto Schwarz – we conclude that, by considering the enslaved to be outside the formation of national ideological life, this tradition remained blind to a fundamental dimension of the dynamics specific to the relations of oppression and resistance in Brazil. Contrasting this tradition with the works of the new Brazilian historiography of slavery, we seek to propose a new way of understanding the formation process and the way in which Brazilian social authoritarianism operates.