Pedagogies of Racial Violence in Colonial Brazil, 16th and 17th Centuries

How did early moderns learn to harm others who looked different from themselves? Colonial Brazil warrants a more prominent place in our attempt to understand the history of racial violence. The swath of South America colonized by the Portuguese gave Europe a tenacious early archetype of Indigenous alterity, and its plantation and mining export economies received more enslaved Africans than any other American slave system. This paper examines the history of violence in Portuguese America as an early transatlantic form of “coercive pedagogy,” clarifying how colonizers came to accept violence organized along what we now construe as racial lines during a time when race remained an exceedingly uncommon social construct applied in ways that differ from the present. Although the emergence of race as a lynchpin of oppressive hierarchies may now seem obvious or inevitable, in practice it required the relentless, methodical forging of a complex system of reeducation whose South Atlantic origins and intricacies remain incompletely understood. Analysis centers on the enslavement of peoples of Indigenous and African descent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the assumption that violence permeated the slave system and demarcated its foundational role in the colonization of the Americas. The Portuguese formulated an array of techniques intended to inflict physical and psychological harm on the majority nonwhite inhabitants of their expanding American possessions. The effort to establish new rules of violence combined legal procedures, theological positioning, military and paramilitary campaigns, and communal and individual acts of corporal punishment. Imperial authorities rationalized physical aggression as necessary, virtuous, fair-minded, and appropriately calibrated to perceived threats. They sanctioned broad categories of coercion as endorsed by their monarch and sanctified by God. Increasingly, they deemed violence indispensable as an instructional practice.