Abstract

Focusing on the “problem” of domestic un-governability in mid-century Brazil, this essay discloses early stereotypes of white (Portuguese Azorean) servants as arrogant, lazy and self-interested. If, on one hand, such degrading stereotypes provided elite Brazilians with what Michael Pickering has called a “comfort of inflexibility,” on the other hand, these representations also shed light on the vulnerability of employers’ domestic authority and social-conflict management in post-colonial Brazil, particularly in the decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in 1888.

Highlights

  • The [enslaved] negro women available at the hiring agencies are incapable of doing anything right; the [indentured] white servants refuse to work

  • Here’s my advice for those who might be looking to seek a fortune in Brazil: Don’t even think of travelling if you can’t afford to buy a well-domesticated slave. (Charles Expilly, Le Brésil tel qu’il est 247)1

  • The conflation of blackness and domestic service was prevalent within Brazilian colonial discourse, as Brazil comprised the largest constituency of slaves, and by implication the highest number of slaves and free Afro-descendent females in domestic service

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Summary

Introduction

The [enslaved] negro women available at the hiring agencies are incapable of doing anything right; the [indentured] white servants refuse to work. My paper proposes to analyze race and domestic servitude in nineteenth-century Brazil, and in particular the pivotal role played by white Azorean maids, through an especially paradigmatic travel narrative of the period: the French merchant Charles Expilly’s Le Brésil tel qu’il est [Brazil as It Is] (1862).

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