Intermarriage in the Quilombo: Southey’s Republic of Runaway Slaves

Abstract

ABSTRACT For Reginald Heber, reviewer of Robert Southey’s History of Brazil in the Quarterly Review, one of the most “striking” parts of Southey’s narrative was that the Portuguese fostered intermarriage in their colonial territories, instead of promoting segregation. Depictions of intermarriage in the text are in fact abundant but remain understudied, even amongst several recent outstanding publications on Southey and imperialism. In this essay, I analyze one of these depictions of intermarriage: the quilombo of Palmares, a “rustic republic” founded by runaway slaves. I argue that Southey uses the quilombo of Palmares, a marginalized multi-ethnic community in the Portuguese imperial territory, to imagine the origin of new nations through intermarriage. I demonstrate that Southey’s Palmares superadds classical republicanism to a discourse of organic nations with distinct customs. I conclude that, for Southey, Palmares illustrates a troubling possibility suggested by the racial constitution of the Brazilian society that pushed Palmarese citizens into marginality: that the dissolution of race categories through intermarriage could be an advantageous and inevitable outcome in imperial societies.