ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to mobilize interpretative lenses to show how fruitful the relationship with literature can be. The intention is to interweave the (literary and scientific) sensitivities of two intellectuals who left us two decades ago: Jorge Amado and Pierre Bourdieu. The work Capitães da Areia (1937) was the main reference to carry out this analytical exercise, at a moment in which we can observe the upsurge of social, cultural, moral, and doctrinal questions that marked the last century. Besides demystifying the “performative discourse” put into practice by State authorities with the support of the media, Jorge Amado constructs a “heretical discourse”. By presenting a kind of (sociological) portrait of children subjected to social racism, Capitães da Areia is the explicitation of the vulnerability of these children, which involves abandonment, family ties, stigmatization, rootlessness, illiteracy, sexual precocity and virility, the pleasure of risk.
Keywords:
Jorge Amado; Capitães da Areia; Pierre Bourdieu; Heretical discourse