History and Regions
The area of concentration “History and Regions” brings together investigations on narratives that show concepts, uses, and meanings of “regions” and their constituent elements. Although “region” allows for various interpretations, here it is taken in the plural “regions” – to characterize a historiographical notion that comprises fields of forces of diverse intensities, sometimes convergent, sometimes conflicting, as constituents of social and symbolic practices that articulates subjects , their identities, alterities and relations with the environment, in multiple temporalities.
The history takes the regions as research-problems conceiving them as elements that extend beyond the character of simple scenery, support or delimitation, configuring, therefore, as essential and proper object of the historian. The regions are understood as human inventions that have historicity, as objects in permanent construction and deconstruction. It is assumed that all construction of regions by the subjects is inherently complex, since they establish conflictual, tactical and/or strategic relations, confronting, mobilizing, and/or confirming macro and micropolitical powers, as well as practices and knowledge. Such subjects produce and are produced by frontiers of exclusion and inclusion, that is, regions that enable their existence. It is based, therefore, on the idea that the regions are composed of borders, here meant beyond their geographical aspect, in the form of fluid and permeable boundaries that establish differences and identifications.
This approach emphasizes the political knowledge and practices of division and differentiation, producing statements considered as true and legitimate, building identities and traditions. The act of writing history is conceived as a reconstructive action of plots, a comprehensive and cartographic effort, developed face to the emergency space of events, where subjects create, invent, and are also agitated by practices of power and knowledge that constitute them, classify them, differentiate them, and explain them.
It aims, therefore, to understand how the practices of powers and knowledge are (re)produced and/or activated and, at the same time, generate regions. It is also assumed that the identities thus constituted are performances superimposed on each other, in a movement linked to the historical dynamics, since: on the one hand, the characters are identified and located strategically; on the other, they invent tactical forms of coexistence and subjectivation.
