Colonial Imaginary and Political Uses of the "Bandeirante" History Among the Far- Right in Brazil.

In early 2022, months after the election of Tarcísio de Freitas — a far-right politician allied with Jair Bolsonaro— as governor of São Paulo state, the public agency responsible for expanding metro lines decided to change the name of a future metro station from Paulo Freire—the famous Brazilian educator and leftist activist—to Fernão Dias, a prominent XVII century "bandeirante", a term used for the colonial explorers and indigenous enslavers of Brazil's hinterlands. This paper introduces a research agenda focused on the presence of the bandeirantes in the contemporary Brazilian far-right imaginary, who explore the aestheticization of myth and the construction of political identities through historical narratives.

By analyzing to the use of images and memes on the far-right's social media today, the work demonstrates that the use of bandeirantes as a political myth is part of a traditional far-right critique of Brazil's historical experience and the role of the State as an agent of modernization. Instead, it favors an colonial imaginary of unregulated land exploitation, the subjugation of indigenous populations, and the glorification of the Catholic roots - including antisemitic elements - of our national formation, with similar elements with the use of crusaders in the European far-right cultural wars.

In this sense, the historical uses of the bandeirante myth mainly serve as instruments for a political imaginary that intertwines reactionary thought and neoliberalism, uniting within a single historical symbol both the racist and religious discourse typical of the reactionary right and the anti-statism and neoextrativism that defines the proponents of radical neoliberalism in Brazil. Thus, the research emphasizes the importance of understanding the various ways in which the bandeirante myth is used politically, as well as the complex relations between the different ideological discourses that surround it.