The Italian language and school as symbolic spaces of contention at the beginning of the 20th century: political, social, and cultural implications

Abstract

This article aims to reflect, from a historical perspective, on the absent presence of the Italian language(s) and culture(s) in the high school curriculum in Curitiba, more specifically at the State College of Paraná at the beginning of the 20th century. As to deal with culture and language is to deal with the sociological and historically situated subject, always in movement, in his relation to the Other, we highlight in this reflection three points that we believe are related to the question of language, namely: a) the divergence between the socially and historically situated Italian immigrant subjects; b) the Brazilian elite’s ideology of Brazil’s racial whitening; c) the lack of a standard spoken Italian tradition in this period. Our reflection is based on the ideas of Bakhtin's Circle that language is indissoluble from the hybrid subject and on the notion of cultural difference that occurs in enunciation, as defined by Bhabha (2013).