Camões tropical: o poeta e o símbolo na construção da brasilidade entre Império e República

Abstract

This article examines how the symbolic figure of Luís de Camões was appropriated in the construction of Brazilian national identity from the Second Empire through the First Republic. The poet emerges as a civilizational hero, a cultural mediator, and an imperial emblem reconfigured by educational discourse, press narratives, and intellectual interventions. Drawing from cultural history, memory studies, and postcolonial critique, the paper explores how Camões was used to legitimize a Luso-affiliated Brazilian identity, later challenged by modernist and republican discourses. Using literary, iconographic, and educational sources, it argues that Camões became both a symbol of symbolic continuity with Portugal and a contested field of ideological and aesthetic renegotiation.