Political Regeneration: José Bonifácio and Temporal Experiences in the Luso-American World in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract
The article analyzes the concept of political regeneration as related to temporal experiences in the processes of political emancipation and the forming of the Brazilian nation. The authors analyze selected texts written by José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a leading politician and intellectual involved in these processes. Such texts supply indications and symptoms that help us to understand how two different historical experiences, designated respectively by this author as the “political regeneration of the Portuguese Empire” and the “political regeneration of the Brazilian nation,” became possible. The uses of the concept of political regeneration in Bonifácio’s discourses may be grasped as symptomatic of the very complex temporal experiences in the context of the Portuguese language during the first decades of the nineteenth century in Brazil.