DISCURSIVE DISPUTES AROUND THE QUILOMBOLA NOMINATION
quilombola communities, discursive practices, critical discourse analysis.
The present thesis approaches the discursive production around the quilombola nomination. The recognition of quilombola subjects and communities has been marked by disputes that involve especially the issue of land demarcation and land tenure regularization in Brazil and the large developmental projects. We argue that the discursivities built around the quilombola category from the different positions assumed contribute to (re)produce different versions about this category. For this, we work with the Critical Discourse Analysis, situated among socioconstructionist research. We analyzed documents in the public domain as critical incidents that allowed us to visualize the controversy produced around the recognition of Quilombola subjects and communities in two sociopolitical contexts. In the first, which covers the period between the 1988 Constitution and the FHC government, we identify two discursive matrices: the archeological, predominant, found both among some actors favorable to quilombola rights and between antagonistic groups, and with less force, the resemantized, defended mainly by the academy (Anthropology) and by the rural black communities mobilized. In the second period, comprised by the two PT governments, the two matrices conform to more delimited positions, and, contrary to the previous period, we have a relative predominance of the resemantized version of quilombo, since the new lexicon produced around the nomination quilombola achieved legal legitimacy by being incorporated into official documents and public policies.