Et terra verbum facta estquando a escritura faz o chão existir (Rio de Janeiro, século XVI)

Resumo

This thesis examines the production of colonial territory in sixteenth-century Portuguese America. It approaches this production as the effect of historically situated operations that articulate language, form, authority, and recognition, thereby shifting territory from an analytical presupposition to a problem in its own right. Its objective is to demonstrate that land does not preexist as domain but comes to be constituted as such through dispositifs that render it intelligible, valid, and governable. The research adopts a qualitative approach, combining diplomatic analysis of land-grant documents, a performative reading informed by speech act theory, archival examination of the conditions of inscription and documentary circulation, and critical interpretation of cartographic representations. The corpus comprises the carta de sesmaria dated 22 July 1568, Benedictine documentation, related land records, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps of the Guanabara region. The findings show that writing does not record a preexisting territorial reality but institutes it as domain through regimes of validity, ritual sequences, and dispositifs of visibility. They further demonstrate that this production entails processes of selection, compression, and hierarchical ordering that stabilize certain presences as evidentiary forms, while others persist in a state of latency. The analysis identifies, within this process, the operation of a performative grammar of land tenure, the constitution of a hierarchical architecture of territorial domain, and the production of a selective cartography of the visible. As a theoretical and methodological contribution, the thesis formalizes ReescreverCOM as an epistemological stance of reading, which may be glossed in English as “Writing-with”; introduces the concepts of latent heritage and archival friction; and proposes an analytical protocol guided by the constitutive tensions of the archive. It concludes that colonial territory emerges as a reality that is simultaneously efficacious and incomplete, whose intelligibility depends on the conditions that make its inscription as evidence possible.

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Tese

Ano

2026

Instituição

Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fonte

Repositório da FGV

Idioma

Português

Acesso

Acesso aberto

Identificador

oai:repositorio.fgv.br:10438/38953

Palavras-chave

Território colonialPerformatividade da linguagemArquivoColonial territoryLanguage performativityArchiveCiências SociaisArquivosCartografiaSesmariasBrasil - História - Período colonial, 1500-1822