Slaves and Citizens, Blacks and Indians: New Approaches to Postcolonial Brazilian History

This paper proposes conceptual and methodological approaches for studying postcolonial Brazilian history through the interrelated histories of its black and indigenous people from the mid- to late- nineteenth century. It critiques the intellectual borders within Latin American history that has separated the study of black and indigenous populations, particularly after independence, and argues that nation-building, realized through the aggressive conquest and colonization of the Brazilian hinterlands, was a process that was both contested and defined by Brazilians of African and indigenous descent, who often lived and worked side by side. As such this paper also challenges the overwhelming and nearly exclusive identification of subaltern populations in postcolonial Brazil with African Brazilians, and contends that indigenous Brazilians must be fully included into analyses of nation-building alongside African Brazilians; failing to do so results in the historian's replication of the nineteenth-century extinction discourse that characterized elite views of Brazilian Indians. Focusing on specific categories of analysis such as race, labor, and citizenship, the paper first examines how the state marginalized both populations in strikingly analogous ways.  The paper then examines indigenous and slave uprisings, marronage, and everyday practices such as the claims of land and kinship as expressions of popular political claims in order to ultimately argue that black and indigenous women and men were at the heart of Brazil's nation-building process.