What does the past teach?

Abstract

The narratives constructed by the Brazilian military dictatorship relied on different spaces and subjects as a way of establishing themselves. In this sense, the Brazilian hegemonic media was directly involved in the practice of military dictatorship. However, the narrative about the dictatorship is still in dispute as to the objectives that were mobilized within certain events, which still need to be problematized. Thus, this study aims to investigate the narrative mobilized by periodicals that circulated between 1964 and 1985 in the city of Arcoverde, in the countryside of Pernambuco, during the dictatorship, in order to understand how the repression relied on the symbolic power of the press for its maintenance. We turn to the critique of the epistemological characteristic of narrative about the past and time in order to consider narration as an examination of linear historical time. The results obtained indicate that the media discourse was organized in favor of the ideological control forged by the dictatorial narrative, whether through the explicit defense of the regime or by subtle agency. The reconstruction of the narrative in question can be considered, even today, a field in dispute, which interferes decisively in the construction of memory and has repercussions in the reproduction of a social imaginary that congregates empty visions about what the military dictatorship meant in Brazil and in Pernambuco. The research, in the end, highlights the need to narrate as a way of reflecting the past as an epistemic and political strategy to value a minority history.