African body marks, stereotypes and racialization in eighteenth-century Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes new dimensions of the process of racialization in eighteenth-century Brazil. It argues that colonial society did not racialize Africans as a homogeneous mass but used several social technologies to make sense of the diversity of their origins. The creation of blackness involved an intense production of knowledge on their origins by means of cultural and visual markers (mainly scarification) associated with the stereotyping label ‘nação’ (nation), and at the same time the use of phenotypic markers that functioned as common denominators of their difference from Europeans. The article contends that these two dimensions of the construction of African difference were not successive, as if one were a stage of the other, as if society first dealt with the diversity of origins and then reduced them to the category ‘negro’. In fact these two instances were interdependent, relational, and hence facets of the same historical phenomenon.