Post-everything: banishment and abandonment in the Grande Sertão

Abstract

In the novel Grande sertão: veredas, the encounter with the catrumanos gives Riobaldo thoughts that blend compassion and fear. His considerations and the way he will treat them, as Urutu-Branco, outlines, to those "men of weird appearance", a complex and ambivalent picture of the relations of strength and power, connecting, in an apparent paradox, that "distant and diverse race" with the character of Zé Bebelo. The thread joining the two extremes can be identified in a "state of exception" that, in an mirrored image, places the political logic and the victims and agents of power in the same situation of anomy.