Tambor Soledade and the “Absent Cause”

Blood, Slavery and Freedom

Abstract

In this essay we propose to interrogate a set of sources, records, narra- tives and images that reciprocally constitute determined articulations to stabilize the meaning of a historical character, the “drum” Manoel Soledade. We critically question the way in which the historicization of the character occurred through crossings, approximations, re-readings and translations that reordered discursive and visual material that today presents itself as a coherent narrative capable of producing determined effects in history and as History. This critical interpel- lation implies, secondly, the theoretical consideration of the relationship between synchrony and diachrony in the definition of legibility for historical facts and characters or, in other words, for the disjunction between syntactic and semantic axes, constitutive of meaning. Thus, it is to the structure of the articulation between text, image, memory and poetry in the constitution of historical fiction that we turn.