Entre ausências e silêncios no Clube da Madrugada: uma interpretação histórica (1950-1960)

Abstract

This study analyzes, from a historical and decolonial perspective, the social and cultural representations present in the writings of the authors of the Clube da Madrugada in Manaus during the 1950s and 1960s, a period chosen because it marks a transitional phase in the Amazonian capital, shaped by tensions between modernization projects and silences that express the coloniality of power, being, and knowledge. It understands literary writing as a space of enunciation, symbolic struggle, and the production of meanings about the city, its subjects, and its hierarchies, drawing on the theoretical contributions of Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and Frantz Fanon, as well as Roger Chartier and Sidney Chalhoub, among other authors. Within this framework, the Clube da Madrugada is interpreted as a cultural movement that sought to break with conservative models and renew the literary expression of local culture, but its activity also reveals limits in the face of the invisibilities that marked the presence of historically subalternized subjects, especially Black people and riverine communities, which calls for attention to the group’s ambivalences. It is worth emphasizing that the research mobilizes diverse sources, such as publications produced by the Clube itself, short stories, poems, interviews, essays, literary magazines, and journalistic articles. Manaus, in this context, is situated as a space of representation and cultural debate in the period under study. The guiding question is: How did the prose production of the writers of the Clube da Madrugada represent riverine people, Black people, and other subalternized subjects in Manaus between 1950 and 1960, and to what extent did these representations challenge or reproduce coloniality? The central argument of the thesis uses the notion of literary epistemic disobedience to interpret the tensions between modernity and an insurgent form of writing that leads to the denunciation of colonialities in Manaus. It therefore understands the Clube da Madrugada as important for aesthetic renewal, yet still shaped by the epistemic dynamics of its time.