There Isn’t Any of that in Ceará, is There? Negationism and the Black and Indigenous People in the Social Formation of Ceará

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the revisionist efforts recently employed in the book O Cearen­se Revelado, by Luís Santos (2020), as well as the Cearense historiographical approaches that, on the one hand, deny or belittle the presence of blacks in the process of social formation of Ceará and, on the other hand, reproduce the discourse of the disappearance of indigenous peoples as a result of the Portuguese colonization, considering the Cearense to be the product of miscegenation between the victorious Portuguese and the eliminated indigenous people. By highlighting a supposed Nordic predominance, the narrative created in O Cea­rense Revelado goes beyond the limits of a revisionist reading, reaching a negationist bias; a quite comfortable perspective to justify hierarchies of power and knowledge in a context of maintenance of social inequalities and the subalternization of indigenous and black people in contemporary times.

Keywords:
Historical Revisionism; ­Negationism; Miscegenation; Blacks; Indigenous People