“Uncivilizable Savages” and “Acculturated” Africans in the National Imagination

This paper employs the lens of performance to investigate how Guido Pokrane, a Botocudo Indian, and Vicente and João, two African men, marked themselves as exceptional figures in postcolonial, 19^th-century Brazil, a new nation built on anti-indigenous violence and slavery. Indigenous people have been marginalized as historical subjects in Brazil after independence, a context which allows Guido Pokrane to stand out. During an official war that legalized the enslavement and killing of the Botocudo, who epitomized the “uncivilizable savage” in the national imagination, Pokrane won accolades for being the “perfect Indian” who embodied the promises of Indian civilization. This paper argues that Pokrane performed acculturated Indianness by mastering the art of imperial patronage and pageantry. In doing so, he won extraordinary power and social mobility, but at the same time, exacerbated the ambiguities and inequalities of indigenous citizenship by helping to construct rights as a privilege. Vicente and João, on the other hand, were “acculturated” (ladino) Africans who performedboçal-ness (recently arrived Africans) before the police in order to try and win their freedom from illegal enslavement. By skillfully manipulating highly subjective preconceptions about what constituted Africanness and acculturation, they succeeded in making themselves exceptional among Brazil’s immense enslaved population. Together, these figures allow us to consider how Indians and Africans utilized performance as a way to manipulate and contest racialized hierarchies in a nation that simultaneously included and marginalized them.