A DISCURSIVIZAÇÃO DO SUJEITO-CRIANÇA NO MUSEU DO HOLOCAUSTO DE CURITIBA

Abstract

This thesis, anchored in the perspective of Michel Pêcheux’s Discourse Analysis, deals with the discursivization of the subject-child in the Holocaust. We took the Holocaust Museum in Curitiba - PR as our corpus and the Second World War or Third Reich (1933-1945) as our historical landmark. When Germany was under the rule of the Nazi regime, it caused a strong impact on the whole of Europe and, consequently, the world, giving visibility to intolerance, hatred, political power, war power and mass extermination, especially of the Jewish people.Given this delimitation, the question that drives us is: How in/through the effects of time and space, in the back and forth between history and memory, is the child discursivized in the Curitiba Holocaust Museum and how does the place of memory organize the production of knowledge about the child? To answer this question, we cut out the discourses on the subject-child at the Curitiba Holocaust Museum (hereafter MHC) to understand how the past is narrativized, constituting effects in the present time and projecting a future temporality. The MHC has a management project, just like the other memorial spaces, and develops social, discursive and ideological practices that corroborate the objectives to be achieved within this management proposal. To this end, it organizes and circulates knowledge involving the Second World War and the persecution of vulnerable groups such as Jews, blacks, people with physical and mental disabilities, Muslims, gypsies, homosexuals, women, children, among others. We considered the history of childhood, taking discursive materialities that represent the subject- child and the place of this subject in fascist regimes, understanding that this relationship functions as a memory (discourse of) that sustains and, in a way, legitimizes the practices of violence against children in contemporary times (discourse about). We carried out the necessary displacements to re-signify the history and memory surrounding these subjects in material that discursivizes them, highlighting the repetitiveness and ruptures in this discourse. The corpus of this thesis encompasses not only the museum as a physical space, but also the virtual one from which memories resonate and effects of meaning are constituted for those who visit it. This archive was built from face-to-face and virtual visits to the MHC, establishing relationships with discourses that circulated before in other places and with history, as historicity that contributes to the discursivization of the subject-child in the MHC. The corpus is made up of different materialities (text-image, objects, videos, documents and others), seeking to show that museums function and have a social, historical and discursive commitment to disseminating events, events and practices, producing knowledge and constituting (dis)courses, which question “the evidence that museums ‘keep’ memories rooted in a stagnant and saturated past, making changes and transformations impossible [...]” (Venturini, 2022, p. 8). The space constructs narratives based on the testimonies of adults who experienced this event in their childhood, presenting discursive materialities through which the child-subject position resonates. The materialities, such as the doll, the shoes and the violin, are based on the imaginary meanings and practices of what it means to be a child in those conditions of production, and establish the testimonial effect. Collecting material from exhibitions such as Janusz Korczak’s “Reformer of the World” and “Only children: childhoods stolen in the Holocaust”, as well as educational projects developed in the community, helped to strengthen the research corpus. The child-subject is discursivized through objects and references, involving the exterior through the organization and availability of travelling exhibitions and educational projects, and that the repetitiveness is anchored in history and memory that return. As a result, we came up with the concept of the testimonial effect, which refers to objects or material traces capable of resonating memories of historically silenced, erased, forgotten or invisibilized subjects, reconstructing their absent presences, reinscribing them in the discursive field.