José Leão Ferreira Souto e a construção da identidade potiguar na transição do século XIX para o século XX

The aim of this work is to build a historical biography of José Leão Ferreira Souto (1850 - 1904), a republican born in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, and from there analyze the gestation of a potiguar identity in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It is intended, first, to understand how social and political relations were woven that allowed Jose Leon to adjectivize an identity to a specific people, linked to a space, Rio Grande do Norte; and, second, to realize as a concrete subject, who lived the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, left his small province and approached thoughts and ideologies that come from Europe and emerging still in a limited way in Brazil. Throughout the text will be sought to demonstrate that this potiguar identity was gestated in Rio de Janeiro and was directly linked to movements of thinkers who lived through the transition from Empire to Republic. For the execution of the work was done a mapping of biographical studies in Brazil, highlighting the works of Adriana Souza and Benito Bisso. From a theoretical point of view the work is anchored in contemporary biographical studies, among which stand out Sabina Loriga and François Dosse. Research sources are organized from materials dispersed in various cities and had not yet been systematized, composed of three types of documents, namely the written production of José Leão Ferreira Souto; productions written by other authors that make references to it; and finally the productions written by others without even making references to José Leão bring explanatory material about the time he lived and on the ideas produced. This study presents three basic conclusions: the biography of a concrete subject shows that European ideas that arrived in Brazil in the nineteenth century were not simply imported because there were elements of internal disputes favoring continuous adjustments to the original assumptions; the building of a potiguar identity was gestated in Rio de Janeiro from positivist ...