A imagem dos “Negros da Guiné” no contexto da expansão marítima Portuguesa: a crônica de Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1453).

Abstract

The present work seeks to understand the narratives of travel, as a form of political action, that is, used as an instrument of power; in this case the power to build an image on the "other" and, from this construction, justify domination over them and thus make way for overseas conquests. The source for this research is the Chronicle of Guinea, by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, written in 1453. For analysis and contextualization of the document, it was necessary to understand the historical context of Portugal in the fifteenth century and the evaluation of the possible meanings of production of a work, whatever nature, because all production is the daughter of its time. Thus, we will analyze the historical content of the narrative to know, first, how blacks were perceived in this document that can be considered a milestone of Portuguese expansion in Africa, and then on which intellectual traditions (concepts, expressions, assertive, authors, etc.) its author based its interpretations on blacks. In view of the above, the narratives of travel in the context of iberian maritime expansion can express the conceptions of the world, culture, the thought of society and the time of those who elaborated them. After all, they are literary and intellectual expressions of historical time and the society in which they were written. In relation to its content, the chronicle under study follows the historical trend analyzed by T. Todorov on the conquest of America, because in it we find a detractor description that is, distorted, of the blacks of Guinea. This description may have been one of the earliest Eurocentric intellectual examples of the classification of blacks as inferior and barbaric, to affirm the superiority of the white man and justify domination over them in the following centuries. The data collected allowed the development of a script for the elaboration of the Learning Object, digital didactic material where we propose a sequence with the theme worked.