Migrants and phantoms: images and pictures of Benjamin Constant

Abstract

After the death of Benjamin Constant in 1891, his image of Founder of the Republic was manufactured by a fraction of the political elites and, above all, by the Brazilian positivists. This heroic image materialized in pictures that migrate from place to place, in different formats and sizes, from the private to the public. This text tries to analyze the historical meanings of this process through the mapping of the trajectories of the pictures, their migrations, resignifications and limits. Positivist republicanism of the late nineteenth century sought to generate a citizen-observer, an individual of the belief in secular and heroic images. To this end, the image of Benjamin Constant was instrumentalized and projected, through his death, into the public space. Thus, his pictures circulated in the press, appeared in monuments, in the fine arts and in the museum that, to this day, preserves his documents and promotes his biography. Finally, the text evaluates the importance and limits of the resumption of the discussion around the mobilization of national images and pictures in times of political crisis.