Representation, Irrepresentation, and Aesthetic Strategies of Rebellion in Brazil

This paper seeks to explore the political consequences of efforts to represent, and irrepresent, the visual culture of transatlantic slavery. My analysis of a corpus of early modern Brazilian texts, objects, and images shows how aesthetic strategies of allusion, metaphor, invisibility, and true-to-life documentation were employed as political strategies in a culture of Brazilian slave rebellion. This corpus includes: an eyewitness account of a slave whipping authored by James Henderson, a British traveler in northeastern Brazil (1821); a public flogging in Rio de Janeiro engraved by Johann Moritz Rugendas (1835); a statue of a flogged Christ sculpted by Francisco das Chagas, an enslaved Afro-Brazilian in Salvador (1760s); and the protective Koranic papers seized from participants in the 1835 Malê rebellion in Salvador. I first explore the duplicitous nature of documentary sources (Henderson and Rugendas). I then move on to explore how the most politically powerful, even rebellious, aesthetics of Brazilian slavery emerge through objects, texts, and images authored by enslaved Brazilians. These take absence, allusion, and metaphor – in a word, the goal to irrepresent – as a conscious aesthetic and political strategy. This analysis opens up space for two parallel arguments. First, particularly for Chagas and participants of the Malê rebellion, their strategic use of representational aesthetics effectively undermines, critiques, and actively protests hegemonic structures of power through an image meant to connote just the opposite: the public body of the flogged slave. Second, I conclude by reflecting back to the present, arguing that the continued use of these objects and images as documentary sources inadvertently reproduces the structures of power they were originally meant to produce, thus obscuring the aesthetic strategies I explore here.