The movement of Inconfidência Mineira in Brazil: discoursive mediation

Abstract

By focusing on the Inconfidência Mineira (an 18th century independence movement in Brazil) and its discursive production, we wish to investigate a dialectical process born at the heart of the political and economical scenario of Minas Gerais county. We will analyse sets of discursive units characterized by specific traits: evasive discourse as a mode of “double saying”, paraphrasing and polysemy. Our goal here is to analyse the discursive workings of the speech of the inconfidentes (conspirers), produced in the context of official inquiries, through the presence of not very precise (evasive) statements, paraphrases, which create literal meanings, and polysemy, which produces the displacement of meanings through ambiguities. The present study, drawing from the area of French Discourse Analysis, aims to unveil the meanings of Portuguese colonial power, and to investigate how the discourse of freedom of the Minas Gerais conspirers emerged from those meanings. Within this discursive context emerged a contradictory speech, at once submissive and rebellious, in which the evasive discourse of the inconfidentes, under Portuguese repression, constituted the convicted defendant Tiradentes. From such an entanglement of meanings the “discourse of History” is born, a product of the clash of ideological meanings in the “discourse in History”, creating a symbol of independence and a national identity.