Na contramão dos tempos: jovens brasileiros, visões da história e a política de cotas

Abstract

The colonization of thought affects not only the ways in which texts are elaborated. If Abya Yala (term adopted as a political stance by native peoples from the beginning of the 21st century to oppose the name America) was discovered, conquered or invaded, this is one of the levels of dispute, which is up to the narrative. In addition to it, there are other instances of manifestation of these kind of discourses. In this article we seek to analyze the strength of the discourses that build colonized thought. We reflect on the impact of these discourses on the construction of meaning by young high school students in Brazil (most in states of Paraná and Bahia) about the past, present and future. Our investigation is effectively divided into three views: the past, the future, and the present. We begin by investigating young people's conceptions of certain historical periods that are crossed by already canonical Eurocentric interpretations. After that, we investigated their conceptions about the meaning and functions of history. Finally, we seek to understand whether there is a relation between previous results and young people's conceptions of concrete actions in the present. For this, we investigated the result of 3,694 responses to a quantitative questionnaire applied in 2019 to high school youth, through the Residente project: observatory of relations between youth and politics in Latin America. The results indicate that there is resistance to the Eurocentric historical discourse in terms of narratives and social issues, but that this resistance has no echo in young people's conceptions of the meaning of history, despite the nuances that point to an appreciation of the function of history by those who agree with narratives of resistance.