This research focuses on the work of Oswaldo Lamartine de Faria (1919 – 2007), a renowned writer in the literate universe of Rio Grande do Norte, who between 1945 and 2005 dedicated himself to the study and writing about the rural world, especially the sertão do Seridó, building a work of varied textual genres and with significant autobiographical marks. The analysis of the discourse that operates in his essays and in the self writing, mainly in his interviews and published correspondence, allowed to undertake the examination of a certain conception about the sertão do Seridó built by him throughout the 20th century, privileging the ways in which in the text their experience with the time and space they put into practice are manifested. Thus, in the first chapter, we approach the existential assumptions that structure the historical knowledge effectively used by the sertanist in his reading of the sertão (RICOEUR, 2007). In the second chapter we dedicate ourselves to the analysis of the research and writing procedures that make up the ethnography put into practice by the author (CERTEAU, 1998). Finally, we consider that the sertanista makes deliberate use of the past to, in an excusive way, invest in the consolidation of a memory about a political domination over the sertão of Seridó.

The objective of this work he was analyze the representations of the sertões in the chronicles of the writer Paulo Bezerra (1933-2017). The main sources of this research were the works Cartas dos Sertões do Seridó (2000), Outras Cartas dos Sertões do Seridó (2004), Novas Cartas dos Sertões do Seridó (2009), Cartas dos Sertões do Seridó – 4th Book (2013) and Últimas Cartas dos Sertões do Seridó (2018). The material used in this study were not ordinary letters of a personal nature, but letters that were sent with the purpose of publishing and disseminating their content, for that reason we will call them as chronicle-letters, based in Silva (2012). These productions were sent by Bezerra to the journalist Woden Madruga, who published them in his column in the newspaper Tribuna do Norte, over the years and with a large volume of chronicle-letters produced, these were gradually published in books. The analysis of the sources was made through the concepts of representation, appropriation and circulation, according to Roger Chartier (2002), which allows us to present the representations created and/or reformulated by Bezerra. The sertões as a category produced to delimit a physical, social and cultural space were thought through authors such as Janaína Amado (1995) in dialogue with other writers who wrote about the Brazilian Sertões, but highlighting the sertão constructed and narrated by Paulo Bezerra.

This dissertation analyzes the implementation of the programs Alliance for Progress, Food for Peace and the Work Fronts in Seridó Potiguar between 1961 and 1978. of climatic calamities, droughts or floods and were decisive for the assistance to the countrysides. At the same time that the social impacts of the calamities diminished, these programs served to fix these countrysides in their places of origin, preventing, to some extent, large migrations. The work goes through an analysis with a political - social historiographical focus and the concepts of sertão, political history and poverty. This research was carried out on the website of Hemeroteca Digital, where the newspapers were found: Diário de Natal, Diário de Pernambuco, Correio Braziliense and O Poti, which allowed us to perceive how the press reported the implementation of programs, but also how it referred to moments disasters, whether droughts or floods. Research was carried out in the archives of the Diocese of the city of Caicó, where through letters, reports and receipts, he clarified and brought us new facts regarding the various programs implemented in the region of Seridó Potiguar. In the same way, the 1st Battalion of Engineering and Construction of Caicó, presented us with official reports that allowed us to deepen the studies on the works managed by the institution, originating several Work Fronts. Throughout the period studied, we sought to clarify how these relationships and structures established in the name of drought and established poverty were primary activities for a crowd that offered labor in exchange for payment and food passed on through agreements signed between governments. of Rio Grande do Norte and the government of the United States of America.

This paper aims to comprehend instituted speeches by contemporary cinematographic images, about hinterland and the prevailing gender issues, mainly, countryside masculinity construction setting in a breaking and continuity way, with regard to moral codes which shape this reality. To achieve this, we get started from a timeline between the years 2000 to 2015, which had as a landmark of some regional film productions with hinterland themes, such Cinema, aspirins and vultures (2005), Luneta do tempo (2014), and soap operas genre, with The Enchanted Tale (2011) production. In addition to these, we also worked here with Boi Neon - Neon Bull movie (2015) directed by Gabriel Mascaro, which was one of the the basic source of this writing. The theoretical and methodological framework is structured on Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, aiming to understand the various layers of meanings that constitute, mainly cinematographic images, actually for the study that we propose to carry out here. This analysis also started from the use of the archaeological method of images, that is, an excavation of the visual layers that constitute our way of seeing the hinterland, based on the suppositions presented by the art historian Georges Didi - Huberman. The theoretical discussion is also based on Queer Theory to understand the new gender relations that are brings in the filmic narrative of Boi Neon - Neon Bull, from the conceptions of Judith Butler (2021) and the reflections of Richard Miskolci (2021) and Guacira Lopes (2018) by all means when they think about gender as a normative construction in culture and the possibility of experiencing another diversity, other ways of exercising masculinity in a different way. plural, beyond the norms. In this sense, based on Didi-Huberman's concept of image survivor or symptom image, we conclude that the images of the hinterlands that preceded the production of Boi Neon are surviving images of other previous visual productions (such as the films of Cinema Novo and Retomada) and that the images captured by Boi Neon are action-images, which, in turn, are critical images, transgressors of a given visuality of the hinterlands and of the time of these images. In this matter, the images around the male and female body here, spatiality are, in a way, deconstructed and different from the elaborations already made around the countryside person, just as it is hinterland/wild from the film's perspective. Therefore, the contemporary hinterland of Boi Neon is a movement of temporal passages - the archaic and the new, of the past and the present, of bodies in "dilatation" and, finally, a hinterland in transit.

The present comprises a series of information mainly focused on the use of new technologies, cell phones, computers, social networks, applications for dissemination, purchase and sale of products, streaming movies, series and music, digital readers and several other tools. Faced with this process of updating, with its polysemic and multifaceted character, the sertões continue to be presented from the perspective of “classical” discourses, mostly synonymous with the Brazilian Northeast region as well as descriptions of sertanejos and northeastern subjects. The constant updating in which the world finds itself does not seem to be adequate to overcome the symmetry between these categories. In this sense, the objective is to carry out a study on the (re)presentations of the sertões in digital media, starting with informative sites, with great reach and visibility, capable of disseminating negative or positive images about the category. As well as the use of social networks, with emphasis on Instagram and a page called Raízes do Sertão and the Blog of Pernambuco photographer Fred Jordão. The investigation seeks to understand, in dialogue with digital history, the images/landscapes of the sertões available in digital media. It is concluded that the contemporaneity of the sertões applies only to its dissemination in digital media as a place with arid characteristics, of "austere" men due to the hostile environment and, at the same time, reinforce a romanticized and telluric vision without facing the historically constructed problems that end up naturalizing such visions.

This dissertation presents the results of an investigation about the connection between the trajectory of Dinarte de Medeiros Mariz and his relationship with the sertão of the Seridó of Rio Grande do Norte, namely his performance with the official policy of “combating” the drought, considering his participation in SUDENE. The objective of the research was to problematize how, as a subject who was forging for himself a political character that represented the sertanejo, he articulated himself with the national policy concerning droughts, appropriating himself as the representative of Rio Grande do Norte. To answer the questions, we approached a specialized bibliography that deals with themes such as sertão, droughts, political trajectories and the history of official bodies for the development of the national policy of combat/containment/control and coexistence with droughts. Based on the reading of authors/es, we reflect on Mariz's political trajectory, on the official policies enshrined in bodies such as IOCS/DNOCS/SUDENE and how, among personal, institutional and official efforts, the drought emerged as "the problem of the Northeast", and later in the Northeast of Brazil, while other reasons of a human nature, and therefore historical, that justified the social problems faced in the region, especially in periods of drought, were masked. In this way, we take as a time frame the years 1954 - 1959, which comprise important periods, with regard to political issues, drought, creation of institutions and the social problems faced in the aforementioned space. From the point of view of the field in which this work is located, we identify it in a zone of confluence and correlation between Political History, Cultural History and Social History from which some concepts become relevant to the understanding of the object, such as: discourse, representation, politics, sertão and modernity. Thus, from the point of view of the sources used in the research, we highlight the Minutes of the Deliberative Council of the Superintendence for the Development of the Northeast - CODENO and of the Superintendence for the Development of the Northeast - SUDENE, and the publications of the newspapers Diário de Natal, O Poti, Diário de Pernambuco and the newspaper O Commercio.

The study analyzes the folkloric production of Ademar Vidal, from Paraíba, and focuses, especially, on his writings from the 1940s and 1950s to problematize his elaboration of the sertão and sertanejo categories. As a starting point, it discusses his intellectual performance linked to institutions dedicated to cultural and literary studies on the identity of Paraíba, such as the Sociedade Paraibana de Folclore (SPF) and the Instituto Histórico Geográfico Paraibano (IHGP), in the 1940s. These insertions were important in the formulation of a discourse on characterizations of the people and the sertanejo space, listed in his work as elements that compose a Paraíba identity, based on three spatialities: coast, marsh or lowland, and sertão. The time frame is justified by the fact that it is the period of greatest circulation of his writing and the cultural research carried out through collaborators from the sertanejos of Paraíba, which were used as sources in the production of his work. In this sense, to map the studies carried out on the sertão and sertanejo of Paraíba, the documentary typology was the productions of his authorship, the unpublished available at IHGP, the bibliography and the correspondence sent to Luís da Câmara Cascudo, made available at the Instituto Câmara Cascudo (Ludovicus). In theoretical-methodological terms, a dialogue was made with the sertão category from Souza (2015), the history of historiography with Certeau (1982), and the concept of intellectual from Gomes and Hansen (2016).

The theme that covers this work is the viola singing in the sertão do Seridó potiguar, since it analyzes its presence in this territory, focusing on the city of Caicó-RN, delimiting its changes and continuities over time. Theoretical debates are based on concepts of Oral History, Cultural History and Popular Culture, as well as dialogues and analyzes based on the concepts of genealogy, history writing and sertões. The sources used are oral, literary sources, hemerographic sources, folkloric books and academic texts, as well as various documents present in the personal collections of poets in the municipality of Caicó. At the end of the research, it can be seen that: viola singing has been active in Seridó since the second quarter of the 19th century; writing about singing changes, as do the statements about singers; and there were changes and continuities based on technological demands, as well as on the readings that cantadores do about the sertões.

Self-appointed of “Romeiros do porvir” some young guys founded in 1900, in the city of Crato, a literary association. Around the Club Romeiros do Porvir, these intellectuals endeavored, in addition to artistic purposes, to build and circulate representations of progress, of intellectuality and the Sertões (like the “other”, seen from Cariri). Thus, we are concerned, in this dissertation, with understanding how the members of this group built and circulated such representations. For this, we investigated the intellectual trajectory of some members of the association, as well as, cultural conditions and practices emerging at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century; we seek to understand how the intellectual and cultural performance of the members of the group contributed to the construction and circulation of representations around themselves and the spaces in which they were inserted; and, finally, we analyze the ways in which the “Romeiros do porvir” built and circulated representations around the sertões. The theoretical dialogues occurred, mainly, in the field of Cultural History from the studies of Roger Chartier (1990, 2002) and from the concepts of cultural practice, representation and circulation, worked by the same author. In order to understand the performance and organization of intellectuals, studied by us, the concepts of intellectual, networks of sociability and generation, worked by Jean-François Sirinelli (1996); and, those of trajectory, field, habitus and the circle of mutual praise, present in the studies of Pierre Bourdieu (2002), were important tools in the elaboration of this work. Sources such as the newspapers A Liça and Cidade do Crato, literary texts, memoirs and minutes of the administrative meetings of the association were used.

This dissertation deals with the sewing of meanings on the sertões in the discursive space of Brazilian fashion, from the launch of two clothing collections signed by Brazilian designers and paraded in national fashion events. In this direction, we have chosen as objects of study the fashion collections “Carne Seca ou Um Turista Aprendiz em Terra Áspera”, by stylist from Minas Gerais, Ronaldo Fraga, launched at São Paulo Fashion Week, in 2013; and “Vaqueiro Desconstruído pela Alfaiataria”, by São Paulo stylist Akihito Hira, winning collection of the Ceará Moda Contemporânea contest, in 2017. In the course of this investigation, we seek to analyze the dialogue of Brazilian designers with the concept of sertão, their inscription in the discursive space of fashion, its association with the language of the clothes, observing the signs that were arranged by the stylists to take the sertões to the catwalks and discuss the imagery and discursive (re)constructions operated from those events, with attention to the continuities and ruptures of meaning about the idea of sertão. We conceive, in this way, that the presence of the concept of sertão in the discursive space of Brazilian fashion implies its (re)creation, that is, the darning of new statements, new ways of seeing and saying them, since fashion, first of all, it is linked to what is contemporary.

This text analyses the Propaganda Against Illiteracy Plan, created in 1928 by Mayor Florêncio Luciano, in Parelhas, Rio Grande do Norte state. Due to our purposes, we chose a short period from 1928 to 1930 as it was seen as the first process of education expansion in Parelhas municipality. We also pay attention to its linking with both state and national campaigns against illiteracy. On this way, the work presents some specific purposes, such as: the plan to eradicate illiteracy, the censuses carried out in the city and in the rural communities, the assembly of an educational cartography aligned to the national and of local insertion, and the arrival of some signs of modernization through an educational perspective for Parelhas.  In terms of methodology, it is first based on a mapping of specific files such as laws and ordinances that governed local education, determining the censuses in urban and rural locations, followed by its critical analysis. As a result of this research, it is possible to perceive as Parelhas, a small place in the Sertão do Seridó region, was enunciated as a contemporary space and attentive to the educational changes wich were taking place in the country.

The present work aims to analyze the participation of potiguares sertanejos as rubber soldiers, during the Second World War, as well as to understand the events that marked the early years of the 1940s and their reverberations in the backlands of Rio Grande do Sul: the project for the occupation of the Valley Amazon, the drought of 1942 and the war effort in the context of World War II. Thus, the sertanejos of Rio Grande do Norte appear, in this work, as central actors who found themselves inserted in all these events through national and international political actions. As it brings the potiguares and amazonian hinterlands as a spatial cut, the work has the bibliographical contribution of authors who discuss the concept of hinterland, to show how these spaces were interpreted until the 1940s, when they became the center of attention due to events already listed. As a time frame, the research was inserted between 1942 and 1946, as it addressed the entry of Brazil in the world conflict and the beginning of the rubber campaign, in addition to discussing the situation in which many Northeastern workers were post-war. For its composition, the work relied on the use of hemerographic sources, bibliographic material and official documents, which allowed us to conclude that the rubber campaign had not only the North American incentive, but the propaganda of the Brazilian government itself, which had pretensions to mobilize a large contingent of northeastern workers for the North region of the country, with the purpose of promoting the occupation and economic development of the Amazon Valley. The analysis of the material used also allowed to conclude that part of these workers experienced a situation of abandonment by the Brazilian government, a fact that ended up triggering the Rubber Commission of Inquiry.

Located in the current territory of the municipality of Caicó/RN, the site Culumins is both the name of the place and the object of study linked to the context of the settlement of the capitania of Rio Grande, consolidated at the end of the seventeenth century and that had in the implantation of the farm structures a privileged locus. This space, based on the interaction between individuals with landscapes and material culture, is analyzed with a view to understanding the aspects related to the economy and the rural society in the colonial Seridó, since the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. Therefore, from the objects and the space where they are inserted, use reading and interpretation of bibliographic references, in addition to the use of archaeological methodologies of field and laboratory research, to address consumer-related social and cultural practices. However, it is noteworthy that the idea of consumption is not restricted to thinking only marketing, but it also integrates the way in which these objects were used and produced by the individuals who lived there and how this can be inserted into other spheres of social relations. This perspective is a way of understanding the material dimension present in the living spaces of the sertão of Seridó, also reflecting the notion of a materiality that integrates the northeastern backlands during the colonial period.