The parts and people of Africa in the work of Father Antônio Vieira: the construction of the literary figure and the idea of ​​the Fifth Empire

The proposal of this article is to point the debate around the categories of the parts and people of the world in the work of Father Antônio Vieira, in view of the Fifth Empire project and the space that Africa and the black slaves in Brazil took in this project. To do so, however, it is interesting to trace how the issue of black slavery was seen by historiography and Brazilian literary criticism, in particular, accompanying the construction of Vieira's literary and historical figure since the late nineteenth century. From the resumption of this course, one can better identify the layers that were deposited and attributed to the Jesuit who built descriptions now positive or negative, mediated by ideas of nation, homeland, progress, civilization and humanity. Less than proposing a sterilized reading of any partiality, to retrace a course of the reception of vieirense work in the past two centuries allows to circumvent (false) problems about the "modernity" or not of Vieira and to rethink the approaches on its production paying attention to other " grammars, "reconstructed from coeval elements and preoccupied with other problems