Inácio da Catingueira Genealogy About the Possibilities of Subversion and Representation in the Art of Improvisation

Abstract

In 1874, in the Municipal Market of the city of Patos (PB), a fight takes place (duel of improvised rhymes) between the singers Romano da Mãe D'Água (white and slave master) and Inácio da Catingueira (black and enslaved). According to records, this fight lasted eight days. We started from this battle and arrived at the MC's battles that take place in the contemporary world in order to answer the questions: “How does the racial theme appear in the transcriptions of the Northeastern surge? And how can black art be an instrument of subversion of the current social order?”. For this, we seek to analyze these disputes and (poetic) battles, weaving an artistic and cultural genealogy that, in this article, has Inácio da Catingueira as the protagonist. Our objectives are: to understand how, after the battle, Inácio da Cantingueira negotiated and denied the representations of people enslaved in the slave period; and, also, how his life is recovered and re-signified by Emicida. For this, we used techniques from Content Analysis (BARDIN, 2016) and representations (HALL, 2016) in order to analyze the historical and social contingency of both characters and their artistic productions.