Páginas ainda em branco: a presença/ausência do negro nas coleções didáticas de literatura, um estudo de caso

Abstract

Historically, basic education has not taken into due consideration the Brazilian plurality in its curricula, since it has partly ignored black people and other minority groups such as indigenous people and women. In the face of this issue, after much struggle by the black movement, Law nº 10.639/03 was created in order to ensure the teaching of content related to Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture. In view of this new configuration, this paper aims at describing and analyzing how textbooks, from different periods, have addressed the black racial issue in the specific area of literature, having in mind that such books are important indicators of the content worked in class, often selecting literary texts, authors and literary perspectives to be discussed in literature classes. For the research, three textbooks from different periods, from the same publishing house and a single author, namely Willian Roberto Cereja, were chosen. The selected textbooks are: Literatura Brasileira (1995), Literatura Brasileira – em diálogo com outras literaturas e outras linguagens (2005) and Português Contemporâneo – diálogo, reflexão e uso (2016). Such a choice was made because this is a very popular author, having his books published by Editora Saraiva, which is one of the major textbook publishers in Brazil. Besides this, the time milestones of publication of these books were part of the criteria for this choice as well, since such books cover respectively the period just before the referred law, a moment immediately after its promulgation, and, finally, a moment after this law. Thus, this paper assesses how these textbooks, used throughout Brazil, whether or not approach the racial issue of black people, through a descriptive analysis of the repertoire of writers and literary texts as well as a comparison between the three books. The research demonstrates as results that the black racial issue has been, and still is, neglected, even though clear improvements can be observed. In this respect, we may infer that many students in basic education neither have had a closer contact with the literary discourse produced by black people in Brazil, nor with the discussions related to race and literature, which is an obstacle to building a truly democratic education.