Aventuras equinociais: disputas entre Brasil e França na fronteira amazônica do Século XIX - as literaturas de Louis Boussenard e Henri Coudreau

Abstract

This investigation has the overall aim of revealing how the formulation of an image of the Amazonian universe at the end of the 19th century was operated, from the perspective of French travelers and literati, inserted in the scope of territorial disputes of their country on the Brazilian northern border, enabling processes of colonialist cultural domain. That said, this study, centered on the border region of French Guiana with Brazil, the scene of European neocolonial interests, has the scope of probing in which ways France promoted its imperialist discourses, under cultural and scientific aspects, in order to consolidate its expansionist purposes. It is intended in this dissertation, specifically, to make an analysis within the perspective of Cultural History, using as a primordial source the literary writings of French travelers and writers of the end of the 19th century, in the context of the so-called Contestado Franco-Brazilian, which occurred on the border of the territory which today covers the State of Amapa. It is also the objective of this research to show how ethnocentric ideological and cultural meanings resist, nowadays, through pernicious coloniality