At the crossroads of Jacarezinho: necropolitics and black resistance in the Northeast of Paraná

Abstract

The article investigates the social and cultural formation of Jacarezinho, Paraná, a process marked by the silencing of Black and Indigenous populations. The central objective of the research is to address the problem of how the understanding of local historical and artistic productions- even when linked to hegemonic narratives of whiteness- offers traces that make it possible to reconstruct and critically examine this erasure. The hypothesis is that such works, when reinterpreted in light of ethnic-racial studies (Gonzalez, 2020; 1998; Gonzalez; Hasenbalg, 1982; Mbembe, 2018a; 2018b; 2020), make it possible to recover a social memory shaped by Black presence and resistance. The research, grounded in a hypothetical-deductive approach, was based on bibliographic and documentary analysis, encompassing academic, institutional, and cultural works available for public access, despite the scarcity of official data regarding the process of enslavement of Black people in the municipality. The theoretical framework mobilizes concepts such as State Racism (Foucault, 2010), necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018), and the pact of whiteness (Bento, 2022), in addition to contributions from local researchers such as James Santos (2024) and Janete Tanno (2018). The results indicate that the official narrative has privileged the exaltation of white “pioneers”; however, from a critical perspective, traces of cultural and religious resistance emerge, revealing the tensions that shape the collective memory of Jacarezinho.