Indigenato Before Race? Some Proposals on Portuguese Forced Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (1926–62)

Was blackness the key factor for labelling native people as ‘non-civilised’ and thus to be pushed into forced labour in Portuguese Africa? Without denying the importance of blackness as a stigmatising tool, this chapter argues, through a careful analysis of colonial law and practice, that the production of ‘nativeness’ was related to clear consciousness of Africans living outside the capitalist economy and social sphere. This helps us to understand that emerging forced labour represented not a smooth transition from slavery, but a rupture between two colonial ages and modes of production. Therefore, if colonial racism obviously used skin colour to construct a social bar, above all it used the definition of otherness as external to the capitalist sphere. Petty whites and natives could live side by side in suburban neighbourhoods, but in two impermeable spheres. Racism was pervasively present, but it was more social than racial.

Charles Boxer and the Race Equivoque 1

Charles Boxer's Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825, which came out nearly half a century ago, has found a readership beyond the circle of those interested in the history of Portuguese overseas expansion. Boxer was perfectly conscious, as he produced it, of the impact his essay would have. He found in the discourse of race an instrument of mediation that allowed him to continue to develop his favoured topics of research in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The response to Boxer's book points to the highly charged atmosphere that continues to surround all debates concerning ‘race’ and, in particular, those that compare North American notions of race with those that can be observed elsewhere in the world. This chapter attempts to shed new light on what caused such a longstanding cross-cultural misinterpretation.

Brazil and Colombia: Comparative Race Relations in South America

This chapter focuses on Brazil and Colombia in the context of the official multiculturalism adopted by both countries. It looks primarily at ‘blackness’, but necessarily also makes reference to the category ‘indigenous’, as this is an inherent part of the processes by which identities come to be defined, claimed and contested. The text shows how blackness in each country oscillated between ‘ethnic’ and ‘racialised’ definitions, both from an official and from a social movement point of view, and how oscillation was related to different contexts and political conjunctures. In Colombia, there was a move between 1991 and 2009 from a very ‘ethnic’ definition towards a more explicitly ‘racialised’ one; while in Brazil, we can see a move from a pre-1988 racial definition towards a more ethnic one, which however coexists with the more racial emphasis. These are not opposed trajectories, but variations on a theme of changing, overlapping and often conflicting definitions.

The New Christian Divide in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)

This chapter intends to offer a general, synthetic and long-term survey of the impact of New Christian segregation throughout the Portuguese empire, between the late fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Writing from the Margins: Towards an Epistemology of Contemporary African Brazilian Fiction

This chapter discusses the extent to which it is feasible to talk of a black Brazilian literary tradition that is somehow cohesive, conscious of itself and self-reflective. In looking at works by black fiction writers during the second half of the twentieth century, such as Romeu Crusoé, Oswaldo de Camargo, Cuti, Geni Guimarães, Marilene Felinto and Muniz Sodré, it suggests that writers of African descent who self-identify as black Brazilians are to a large extent bound by identification with region as much as they are with skin colour, in a similar way to other ‘ethnic’ writers in Brazil.

The ‘General Language’ and the Social Status of the Indian in Brazil, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

This chapter focuses on the uses of language in successive historical strategies in Brazil. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Tupi language was the main vehicle for the catechising work of the Jesuits, a precondition for the conduction of the Indian to the mystical body of the Portuguese empire; from 1758 onwards, Portuguese was imposed as the sole official language for the integration of the Indian as a vassal of the Portuguese king; and in the nineteenth century, Tupi became nationalised for literary and scientific purposes. In each moment, different figures of Indian otherness were traced, from the Jesuits' other as ‘the same’ or ‘fellow man’, to the other as ‘cultural difference’ or ‘racial difference’ in the civilising projects of the Brazilian empire.

Colour and Race in Brazil: From Whitening to the Search for Afro-Descent

The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the way in which Brazil has developed a system of colour classification with regard to Afro-descendants in the period since abolition. The intention is not only to show how this system developed over time, but also how it has been shaped by the mobilisation of the black population around the notion of race: as a group sharing solidarity and common experiences of subordination and discrimination. The strategy is to trace the terms ‘colour’ and ‘race’ and their meanings through time, as used or systematised into classifications by the state, social movements and social scientists. This study is both preliminary and incomplete, but it is hoped that it can serve as a guide for future and more systematic research on specific periods, places and social agents.

From Marco Polo to Manuel I of Portugal: The Image of the East African Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

Less than twenty years after Vasco da Gama joined the commercial perimeter of the Indian Ocean (1497–8), European artists had developed a view of the newly discovered lands, ranging from highly exotic and sometimes quite fanciful renderings based on medieval sources (the ‘Tapestries of the Indies’) to careful ethnographic illustrations based on written and visual sources (Hans Burgkmair's large woodcut frieze, People of Africa and India, of 1508). These few years, in which the monstrance of Belém of 1506 (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon) was produced with the gold of Kilwa, also saw an interesting development in Portuguese gold coinage. All these ventures record a brief moment of European fascination with the east coast of Africa and its multicultural inhabitants, which is the object of this study.

Marriage Traps: Colonial Interactions with Indigenous Marriage Ties in East Timor

This chapter explores Portuguese colonial relations with Timorese marriage institutions during the late colonial period. By drawing on the rich colonial history of the barlake (traditional marriage contracts) in East Timor, it proposes a novel approach to the trope of intermarriage in the Portuguese-speaking world. In addressing the variety of relationships with marriage in colonial practice, the chapter conceptualises three main types of colonial interactions with indigenous marriage: predatory, parasitic and mimetic. It uses case studies to show how these distinct forms of interaction could be associated with distinct colonial agents and their particular agendas. The chapter shows how, in late nineteenth-century East Timor, colonial relationships with barlake were marked by a tense coexistence between, on the one hand, the predatory model followed by the Catholic missionaries, and, on the other hand, the parasitic exploitation of indigenous marriage ties, customarily practised by colonial officers and governors.

Mulattos in Brazil and Angola: A Comparative Approach, from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century

Portuguese enclaves in Brazil and Angola maintained bilateral trade and cultural exchanges from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. While in Brazil the growth of the mulatto population appears as a key feature of Luso-Brazilian colonialism, and Afro-Brazilians have come to constitute the majority of the current Brazilian population, mulattos never exceeded 2 per cent of the Angolan population prior to the 1970s. And yet Luso-Brazilian miscegenation eventually became the bedrock of ‘lusotropicalism’, an essential component of Portugal's colonial ideology in the second half of the twentieth century. To understand these paradoxes, beyond the demographic figures, this chapter examines the historical processes concerning mulattos as a group on both sides of the South Atlantic. Among its conclusions is that miscegenation is a necessary but insufficient condition for the growth of a mulatto population.