The conqueror of the West and the narratives of confrontation and devastation of nature in the building of the Belém-Brasília road

Abstract

The geographic conquest of the West was an ambitious challenge, in which the wilderness’s dominance had a fundamental role on the official speeches and on the literature related to this topic. As such, this paper aims to identify the confrontational standing of nature presented in March to the West discourses and in other documental sources from the first half of the 20th century. The study of these documents has as its objective to identify the representations of the conqueror of the West, by means of creating a heroic image of Bernardo Sayão. The paper looks to base this theory and methodology on environmental history, by analyzing different sources and documents that permit the characterization of nature’s representatives on the Brazilian social imaginative though in the 1940s and 1950s