Cidade revelada, o povo dentro do quadro : a violência simbólica e a estética da exclusão nas charges da Primeira República

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how symbolic violence and processes of social exclusion were visually articulated in cartoons published in Rio de Janeiro during the First Republic (1900–1930). As a widely circulated form of graphic humor, cartoons are analyzed here as both urban documents and ideological devices—capable of condensing and translating social, racial, moral, and spatial disputes. The research takes the body as a key interpretive lens, understood not only in its biological dimension but also as a symbolic, political, and affective territory where urban experiences are inscribed and through which the city is produced and re-signified. Through an iconological analysis informed by the new rhetoric, the study examines periodicals such as O Malho, Careta, Fon-Fon!, and Para Todos, highlighting both how marginalized subjects were represented and the role of these images as records of the tensions and intradictions of republican modernization. The research focuses on recurring archetypes, such as Zé Povo, the malandro, the Black woman, and the “new woman”, figures that condense class, race, and gender conflicts, functioning simultaneously as targets of mockery and as resistant symbols of urban identity. In this context, “bad humor,” understood as critical social satire, emerges as both a tool of denunciation and an expression of popular tensions and aspirations. The concept of the corpography of the urban is also central to the analysis: it reveals how bodies not only occupy urban space but also inscribe it, and are inscribed by it. Even when stereotyped or domesticated, these figures endure as traces of popular presence, challenging official narratives and opening paths to a critical reading of the city’s history. In this sense, cartoons operate as counter-archives of urban modernity: rather than erasing subalternized bodies, they expose their persistent presences and everyday performances as constitutive forces of urban space.