THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORGETTING: THE CURRICULAR PACT OF WHITENESS AND THE PRODUCTION OF VALUE IN BRAZILIAN SCHOOLING

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Law 10.639/03 as an intervention in a political economy of forgetting that has structured the Brazilian school curriculum since the nineteenth century. Rather than analyzing the exclusion of African history as a mere omission or prejudice, it investigates how this forgetting has been productive: it has generated specific forms of symbolic capital, consolidated textbook markets, naturalized racial hierarchies, and distributed recognition unevenly. The concept of the curricular pact of whiteness, developed throughout the article, designates the historical arrangement through which white centrality in the curriculum functioned as an invisible norm for the accumulation and distribution of cultural value. The 2003 law represents a partial rupture with this pact: it displaces Africa from the place of absence, but does not dissolve the mechanisms that produced it. It is argued that the effectiveness of the legislation depends on understanding that it is not enough simply to add content; rather, it is necessary to dismantle the political economy of forgetting, an operation that requires the redistribution of epistemic power, not merely representational inclusion.