Historiography on criminal slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil | Iraneide Soares da Silva (UESPI)
[Black people in 1948] Unloading a boat at the port | Photograph: Pierre Verger/Museu Afrodigital da UFMA.Abstract: In this article, we review, especially, the literature that deals with slavery against Africans and their descendants. Here, we comment on the main productions on the subject of slavery, trying to contemplate all regions of the country, analyzing three interpretative aspects about black people in the city of São Luís do Maranhão.
Keywords: Criminal slavery, Africans, São Luís do Maranhão.
Introduction
Based on historiographical readings and reflections on African slavery and its descendants in Brazil, having as a starting point the city of São Luís do Maranhão and its black population in the first half of the 19th century, it is possible to identify three main strands of interpretation about the what we call “black people”. The first of them seeks a paternalistic view, followed by Gilberto Freyre.
The second brings a purely economic discussion of the enslaved person, often considering him as an object, being followed by the group of historians and social scientists trained at the University of São Paulo, including important names such as Caio Prado Jr. and Emília Viotti in their first works on the subject.
In this same vein, Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Jacob Gorender present the concept and mode of colonial slave production, seeking to identify the internal logic of reproduction of the slave order, as opposed to the aspect that treats Brazilian slavery as a form of subjection to the external process of capital development European merchant.
The third strand seeks to understand the enslaved as an agent of their own history, followed by Silvia Lara, Sidney Chalhoub, Solange Rocha and others. Those who follow this trend propose a historiographical review in order to perceive the existing fissures in the history of Brazil and its workers. As Chalhoub proposes, the objective is to deepen and enrich the academic production on the history of workers in Brazil, in order to provoke the revision of some classic interpretations and suggest new avenues of investigation.
It can be said that this intellectual and political effort has shaken what we call here the “paradigm of absence”. Moreover, it threatens to bring down the historiographical Berlin wall arising from the aforementioned paradigm, which still prevents the necessary dialogue between historians of slavery and scholars of the political and cultural practices of poor urban workers and the labor movement.
The revisionist productions of the 1980s and 1990s criticized the image of the enslaved person as a mere commodity of an economic system. Instead, these studies sought to understand the enslaved as an active subject inserted in complex social, ethnic and cultural relationships. These new approaches were motivated in large part by the centenary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1988, which brought to the fore debates and reflections on the legacy of slavery in Brazilian society.
Many of these studies were influenced by the English historian E. P. Thompson, whose creative reading of Marxism, supported by a wide dialogue with anthropologists, contributed to the renewal of Brazilian historiographical thought with regard to studies on slavery and workers in general. Thompson argued that history cannot be reduced to a mere succession of economic events, but that it is constructed through the actions of historical subjects, who have agency and can transform the world around them.
In the same line, the historiography of Brazilian slavery today seeks to understand the practice and functioning of slavery not only as a form of work, but also as a sociocultural system, which profoundly shaped the relations between whites and blacks in the country. According to Schwartz (2001), this new historical perspective has been able to break with old paradigms and propose new approaches to understand the complexity of Brazilian history.
Objects of compassion
Our readings on the subject followed the classic line, firstly the studies inaugurated by Gilberto Freyre, especially the work Casa Grande e Senzala, published in 1933, which refuted the inferiority of blacks and their negative contribution to the formation of the Brazilian people, defended by Nina Rodrigues and Oliveira Viana. In Freyre’s conception, the master was good and the enslaved was docile and obedient, which ended up creating an idyllic vision of our colonial past that rests on the myth of racial democracy in Brazil.
This perspective permeated the understanding that the basis of the system would be the “Brazilian patriarchal family”, a space where miscegenation between human groups would occur, a proposal that would often be interpreted, due to the author’s ambiguities, as the existence of a mild slavery in the Brazil. His ideas would strongly contribute to the consolidation of the so-called “myth of Brazilian racial democracy” and, consequently, would influence the works of North American authors, such as Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins, who contrasted the violence of North American slavery with the supposed mildness of the Brazilian slavery. [1]
Our path of research in newspapers and other sources finds contradictions in Freyre, as the marks left by the mistreatment of black workers do not suggest friendship or goodwill; proven here with the following announcements: Cristóvão ran away days ago. He was “a 24-year-old Creole slave, carpentry officer, belonging to Viriato Bandeira Duarte” “[…] beautiful figure, ordinary stature, and has a large scar measuring 4 inches on his back”. He ran away a slave from Angola in 1843, aged 25 or 30. “[…] with signs on the back, and in the accent of having been punished for a long time, in addition, he has a scar on the elbow of one arm, his legs are mainly very arched, so he puts the tip of his toes very far inward , which is commonly known as the foot of the curica”. Maria da Cruz fled. “[…] he has puffy eyes, and two large scars on his forehead, which show that they were made with a club”.
These advertisements were published between 1842 and 1844 in the newspaper Publisher Maranhense. From the printed material in that periodical, we found in the 146 runaway advertisements analyzed that the marks of violence were very present in the daily lives of those black men and women. In this way, Freyre’s work serves us to reflect on the strength of the look of the big house on the slave quarters that ends up strengthening an ideology that permeates decades, but does not attest to friendship between master and slave.
Objectified black people
In the 1950s, some works were produced which aimed to highlight the relations of production in colonial and imperial Brazil, based on studies that revealed the importance of slavery for the accumulation of capital. We understand this to be a second theoretical strand of interpretation of slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil. This aspect analyzed the enslaved worker under the strict perspective of profit. This study would come to understand and justify Brazilian slavery as the best way to produce and export primary products on a large scale and at the lowest cost. Thus, characteristics and ways of life in Brazil would be the result of the type of colonization imposed by the European economy. Thus, it would not be possible to explain the country’s situation by other factors (such as the climate or the ethnic groups that formed it), since the type of colonization we had would explain what we are.
According to Ferrari Fonseca, [2] the enslaved worker would then be the brute force, the material and essential element for carrying out the works that would move our colonization. And, in modern times, the enslaved would be just a working machine. For Caio Prado Jr., slavery was a means, an opportunity, used by Europeans to commercially exploit the vast territories and riches found in the New World.
When analyzing this second strand, it is clear that the main problem of these works is that they conceive the enslaved as objects, citing Jacob Gorender and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, among others, as representatives of this tendency. In the conception of these scholars, the enslaved person had no personality, as he was just a mere instrument, since slavery took away his ability to think and see himself as a person, as an active subject and willing to fight against his own condition of enslavement . Such analyzes are accused of promoting the objectification of the enslaved.
Still in this light, we have Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Jacob Gorender who present the concept of “colonial slave production mode”, in which they detect an internal logic of reproduction of the slave order, which opposes the way of treating Brazilian slavery, as being subjection to the external process of development of European mercantile capital. [3]
In this second aspect, there is also Emília Viotti da Costa. That, although it is one of the references we use, as we consider it obligatory in studies of slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil. This suffers from a series of criticisms, especially the book “Da senzala à Colônia”, published for the first time in 1966, when dealing with the transition from slave to free labor in the coffee areas of São Paulo, it proposes a materialist and dialectical interpretation of the process of transition from work slave to free labor. With that, in this work, the historian corroborates the view of others by defending that slavery took away from the enslaved their traditions, their conception of the world, in short, their humanity.
However, Viotti “advances” by opposing purely political explanations about abolition. For her, both the presence of white immigrants as labor and changes in means of transport (implantation of railroads), as well as the forms and transformations in coffee processing processes would also have cooperated for the end of slavery. [4]
Clovis Moura, despite the importance of his work and reference to us, especially when dealing with slave resistance, can also be considered as belonging to this second strand, because in contesting the mildness of slavery idealized by Freyre, he studied the enslaved from his rebellions. Clovis Moura [5] dealt with the Bahian revolts that occurred in the first half of the 19th century, seeking to characterize the violence of slavery, in addition to analyzing it from an eminently economic perspective.
In 1971, José Alípio Goulart publishes Da palmatória to patibulo and analyzes the spread of fear by the government of enslaved people who committed certain crimes. For Goulart, there were two main reasons for this fear, which was to satisfy the people and to frighten the enslaved when they were considered criminals.
On the subject of slave reactions or resistance, we can mention the work Palmares — the slave war, written by Décio Freitas, which, released in 1973, brings us concrete data about Zumbi and the social formation of Palmares. [6]
Still in the period of affirmation of the strand of “objectification of the enslaved”, the ideas of the Paulista School of Sociology also stood out, which studied, among other topics, the situation of Africans and their descendants and the racial prejudices existing in Brazil. This School was composed of names like Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Octávio Ianni.
In addition to these authors criticizing the idea of paternalistic slavery, as well as the existence of a racial democracy, they reinforced the thesis that the enslaved did not see himself as a historical agent. In this way, these discussions also strengthened the ongoing debate on race relations.
In summary, from the 1950s onwards, there were many studies that discussed, criticized and contested Gilberto Freyre’s ideas. For the most part, they were debates based on economicist theories to understand slavery. These ended by denying the enslaved worker his status as a historical subject, partly responsible for his own liberation throughout the entire period of criminal slavery.
In the international scenario, in the 1970s, inspired by the American civil rights movements, the historiography of that region of the Americas and studies on slavery intensified in the search to point out the place of the enslaved as a historical subject. Among the works that represent this ideology is the book The Promised Land — the world that slaves created by Eugene Genovese, originally published in 1974. [7]
In this work, Genovese used, in an innovative way for the Brazilian moment, the term paternalism, (this concept, linked to A. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony), however, this differs from the patriarchal family defended by Freyre in the 1930s in Brazil. Genovese claimed that paternalism was seen differently for slaves and masters. According to him, for the enslaved, paternalism was seen as an instrument of domination and, consequently, a way of preventing solidarity networks between blacks as a way of establishing obligations between them. Therefore, for enslaved workers, it was a negotiation to bargain for better conditions of survival within the oppressive structure.
Black people as beings of rights
The third of the strands analyzes the enslaved black worker in his diversity of legal condition, as an agent of his life, who fought for a less oppressed, less violent life. And to escape the hard line of slavery, he looked for ways to free himself from captivity.
The 1980s were fruitful for this line of thought and a great fight against the image of the enslaved as a mere commodity of an economic system emerged, seeking to understand it within social, ethnic and cultural relations. These currents are new readings that began around the centenary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil as a form of commemoration that we still celebrate today.
Briefly, the third aspect, when interpreting slavery in Brazil, defends the existence, albeit relative, of an enslaved person’s autonomy in view of his relationship with captivity; with their tormentors, in work relations at home and on the street; relationships and solidarity networks; of negotiations; in the escapes and confrontation with the police. However, even not adding the category of “class struggle”, it seeks to place it, even in part, among many other conflicts that existed throughout the existence of slave labor, and thus understand these workers in their multiple experiences. For this aspect, the focus is not on the enslaved black as an economic agent inserted in the objective conditions of production, but as a subject, that is, as a participant in slavery.
Kátia Mattoso, in the work Being a Slave in Brazil, examines what the life of enslaved people would have been like. His production covers an extensive period that goes from the 16th to the 19th century with the objective of analyzing slavery in general, starting from the point of view of the enslaved. This author talks about the reasons that led the enslaved person not to submit to the strict discipline of his master, as shown in the following fragment and also mentioned elsewhere in this work:
[…] when the black person is unable to create his necessary spaces of freedom, does not find a family, group, confraternity, entertainment of his own, then, yes, and only then, does he refuse the discipline of work and pass into the terrible domain of repulsion, of punishments, revolt. [8]
Scene from Angola and Janga. (D’Salete, 2017, p.12)
The reading of these texts, especially the third strand of studies on slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil, enabled us to understand, at different levels, the spaces for negotiations within the relations of slaveholders shaped by the oppression that was the process of enslavement that many people went through. Brazilian black men and women. We also understand that the enslaved, in their wisdom, used slavery to improve their living conditions and their own culture and family life. Our press sources indirectly pointed out an action, such as the African woman who was freed by law “[…] fled yesterday having found out about her house on Caju beach before nine o’clock at night, one of those Africans who were freed by the law.”[9]
Our understanding is that the construction of freedom by enslaved workers did not only happen through the inflamed speeches of abolitionists, but also (and mainly) was woven by the enslaved workers themselves who never, at any time during the Brazilian period of slavery, accepted passive mode to slavery. In our research on the first half of the 19th century, in Maranhão, we found advertisements of slave escapes in the Province. Advertisements that called our attention due to the character that, in our understanding, they have of the non-acceptance of slavery by the enslaved themselves. [10]
The extensive production that marks the years from 1980 to 2000, with published works that deal with the most different aspects of Brazilian black slavery, attests that the themes of the economy, quilombos, rebellions and escapes expanded and gave space to others, such as the processes for obtaining manumission and the life of the freedman, the slave family, the legislation on slavery and the use of this legislation by enslaved people, such as the enslaved black woman “Esperança Garcia” in the State of Piauí; ethnicities and identities; the relationships between enslaved and freed people, the processes of re-enslavement and freedoms, the daily life and the work relationships of those enslaved for gain, of the streets, among many others
We also emphasize the importance of the theses produced, having as a point of reflection the historiography on resistance. When we focus on the studies of Maria Helena Machado from the University of São Paulo/USP (1991) that deals with slave criminality in São Paulo plantations and that of Silvia Lara in the field of Goytacazes, we realize that the authors analyzed how violence was approached during the period of slavery, migrating to the daily relations between masters and slaves. With this, they show that there was a relative negotiation between the enslaved and their masters for the improvement of relations and life.
Thus, in a way, it is attested first that the masters knew that a slave rebellion could bring tragic consequences, especially with regard to their production. On the other hand, the enslaved were also aware of their importance for the maintenance of capital. Therefore, in some cases, there was openness to negotiations, resignified as a form of resistance according to the understanding we had.
Along the same lines, we have the important works of José Carlos Reis and Eduardo Silva (Negotiation and Conflict – black resistance in Brazil under slavery), which address the issue of slave resistance in the context of Bahian and Rio de Janeiro societies. Then, Sidney Chalhoub emerges with Visions of freedom in which he analyzed the last decades of slavery and its decline at court. In this work, Chalhoub emphasizes the different understandings of freedom on the part of the masters and the enslaved.
We agree with the perspective of Silvia Lara, Maria Helena Machado and Sidney Chalhoub, regarding considering black workers as active historical subjects and also, the practice of escapes as a form of resistance. However, we did not verify in the researched sources, negotiations, neither by parts of the enslaved, nor by the masters, in the line of Reis e Silva, even knowing that empirically this occurred.
We consider the vast academic production on slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil to be of great relevance. This work not only accepts, but uses many of the theoretical and methodological reflections, mainly in the line that seeks to recover the historical experience of enslaved and freed workers, and the political meanings of their acts and ways of living, as attested by João José Reis, Sidney Chalhoub, Leila Algranti, Silvia Lara. [11]
From the slopes to the scope spaces
We emphasize that, although the academic production on the subject of slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil, empire, colony and republic, with national and international expression, is wide, for the most part, it is limited to the southeast, northeast (Bahia and Pernambuco), leaving the rest of the country with timid or inexpressive production.
Our research in this field, produced on the province of Maranhão, especially with black workers in the capital, São Luís, adds to the theses of Antônia Mota (2007); Josenildo Pereira (2007); Regia Agostinho (2013) among other master’s dissertations.
In the context of the Brazilian Northeast, some research has been produced that deserves to be highlighted and inspires us to walk within our theoretical and methodological line. Solange Pereira da Rocha’s thesis, Black people in Paraíba in the 19th century, produced as part of the graduate program in history at the Federal University of Pernambuco, is one of these. Its author innovates by outlining the universe of part of the black people of the province of Paraíba, notably enslaved and non-enslaved women and men through baptism records.
Along the same lines, we also have the theses: Slavery, Freedom and Resistance in Sergipe: Cotinguiba, 1860 – 1888; [12] Representations of Slavery in the Journalistic Press of Maranhão in the 1880s; [13] The Equatorial Athena: the foundation of a Maranhão in the Brazilian empire. [14] These works, in addition to the geographical demarcation, as they are produced on the Northeast region of Brazil, with regard to the subject of slavery and work, allow us to access archives and sources that are still little explored in the Northeast and on the Northeast of Brazil. Given their importance, these are added to the studies produced in the last decades of the 20th century, as we have already highlighted Leila Algranti and Silvia Lara (1888); Correia (2011) and Santos (2013). These works are theses from the 1980s to the 2000s that point to a new prism regarding slavery that is: “slavery and power in the context of relationships”.
Conclusions
As reflexões aqui empreendidas levaram-nos a traçar um breve balanço histográfico o que nos permitiu na produção do trabalho e da pesquisa, compreender sobre a escravidão brasileira e identificar três vertentes principais de interpretação: a primeira que busca uma visão paternalista; a segunda que traz uma discussão meramente econômica do escravizado que — em linhas gerais, muitas vezes entende-o como objeto — e, por fim, a que busca compreender o escravizado como um agente de sua própria história.
Foi preciso um estudo mesmo que breve da bibliografia citada. Para tanto, tivemos que fazer escolhas e considerar as especificidades da constituição de uma cidade ao norte da região nordeste do Brasil, inserida entre o mar e rios, agraciada por uma exuberante beleza natural.
Este estudo que se encerra, foi motivado por problemas atinentes à experiência negra da cidade de São Luís do Maranhão onde nas primeiras décadas do século XIX tinha uma população estimada em trinta mil habitantes, e destes, 51% eram de africanos e seus descendentes. Nossa intenção era compreender a constituição de São Luís em conjunto com o resto do país que respiravam uma Europa mesmo nas menores províncias, e em meio a esses, conviviam com homens e mulheres negras inseridos nas categorias de escravizado enquanto objeto ou sujeitos ausentes, invisíveis. Consequentemente, era também a nossa meta enfrentar equívocos cometidos por uma historiografia mais conservadora a partir de leituras de documentos dos muitos arquivos brasileiros, insensíveis às experiências dos escravizados, enquanto sujeitos históricos na escravidão.
Vale ressaltar que ao analisar a terceira vertente dos estudos sobre a escravidão negra no Brasil pôde-se perceber que em muitos desses têm-se grande influência metodológica, sobretudo, de E. P. Thompson, historiador inglês que, embora nunca tenha estudado a escravidão do africano no Brasil, contribuiu imensamente para a renovação do pensamento historiográfico brasileiro no que diz respeito aos estudos sobre a escravidão e as classes trabalhadoras de um modo geral. Na visão de Schwartz (2001), essa nova historiografia da escravidão brasileira tenta compreender sua prática e seu funcionamento não apenas como forma de trabalho, mas também como um sistema sociocultural.
[1] For a better understanding of Freyre’s ideas, see the work Casa Grande e Senzala by this author and also Ricardo Benzaquém de Araújo, Guerra e Paz – Casa Grande e Senzala and the Work of Gilberto Freyre in the 30s, Rio de Janeiro, Ed . 34, 1994. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, New York, 1947, and Stanley Elkins, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959.
[2] Ferrari; Fonseca, 2015.
[3] Pinto, 2004.
[4] Eisenberg, 1989.
[5] Moura, 1959.
[6] Freitas, 1978, p.9.
[7] Genovese, 1978.
[8] Mattoso, 2003, p. 116.
[9] JornalPublicadorMaranhense, edição n.º 34. Sábado, 12/ 1842.
AMARAL, Sharyse Piroupo do. Escravidão, Liberdade e Resistência em Sergipe: Cotinguiba, 1860 – 1888. Salvador, 2007. Tese (Doutorado em História) – Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Federal da Bahia.
BORRALHO, José Henrique de Paula. A Athena Equatorial: a fundação de um Maranhão no império brasileiro. Niterói, 2009. Tese (Doutorado em História) – Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da Universidade Federal Fluminense.
CHALHOUB, S.; SILVA, F.T. Sujeitos no imaginário acadêmico: escravos e trabalhadores na historiografia brasileira desde os anos 1980. Cadernos AEL. Campinas, v.14, n.26, 2009.
CHALHOUB, Sidney. Visões da Liberdade – uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990.
EISENBERG, Peter. Homens esquecidos: escravos e trabalhadores livres no Brasil – Séculos XVIII e XIX. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 1989.
FREITAS, Décio. Palmares. A guerra dos escravos. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1978.
GENOVESE, Eugene. A Terra Prometida – O mundo que os escravos criaram. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1988.
LARA, Silvia Hunold. Campos da Violência. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1988.
MACHADO, Maria Helena P. T.. Crime e Escravidão. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987.
MATTOSO, Kátia de Queiróz. Ser escravo no Brasil. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982, reimpressão, 2003. (Reimpressão com prefácio de Ciro Flamarion).
MOURA, Clovis. Rebeliões na Senzala (quilombos, insurreição e guerrilhas). São Paulo: Edições Zumbi, 1959.
PEREIRA, Josenildo Jesus de. As Representações Da Escravidão Na Imprensa Jornalística do Maranhão da Década de 1880. Trabalho apresentado ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em História Social do Departamento de História da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) no ano de 2006.
PINTO, Diana Berman Correa. A produção do novo e do velho na historiografia brasileira. Dissertação de mestrado. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro – PUC-RIO, 2004. CHALHOUB, S.; SILVA, F. T.. Sujeitos no imaginário acadêmico: escravos e trabalhadores na historiografia brasileira desde os anos 1980. Cadernos AEL. Campinas, v. 14, n. 26, 2009.
PINTO, Diana Berman Correa. A produção do novo e do velho na historiografia brasileira. São Paulo, 20004. Dissertação (Mestrado em [História]) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
REIS, João José Reis; SILVA, Eduardo Silva. Negociação e Conflito – a resistência negra no Brasil escravista. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989.
SILVA, Iraneide Soares da. Historiografia sobre o escravismo criminoso contra os africanos e seus descendentes no Brasil. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.10, mar./abr., 2023. Disponível em <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/historiografia-sobre-o-escravismo-criminoso-contra-os-africanos-e-seus-descendentes-no-brasil-iraneide-soares-da-silva-ufpi/>. DOI: 10.29327/254374.3.10-12
Historiography on criminal slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil | Iraneide Soares da Silva (UESPI)
20 February 2023
[Black people in 1948] Unloading a boat at the port | Photograph: Pierre Verger/Museu Afrodigital da UFMA.Abstract: In this article, we review, especially, the literature that deals with slavery against Africans and their descendants. Here, we comment on the main productions on the subject of slavery, trying to contemplate all regions of the country, analyzing three interpretative aspects about black people in the city of São Luís do Maranhão.
Keywords: Criminal slavery, Africans, São Luís do Maranhão.
Introduction
Based on historiographical readings and reflections on African slavery and its descendants in Brazil, having as a starting point the city of São Luís do Maranhão and its black population in the first half of the 19th century, it is possible to identify three main strands of interpretation about the what we call “black people”. The first of them seeks a paternalistic view, followed by Gilberto Freyre.
The second brings a purely economic discussion of the enslaved person, often considering him as an object, being followed by the group of historians and social scientists trained at the University of São Paulo, including important names such as Caio Prado Jr. and Emília Viotti in their first works on the subject.
In this same vein, Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Jacob Gorender present the concept and mode of colonial slave production, seeking to identify the internal logic of reproduction of the slave order, as opposed to the aspect that treats Brazilian slavery as a form of subjection to the external process of capital development European merchant.
The third strand seeks to understand the enslaved as an agent of their own history, followed by Silvia Lara, Sidney Chalhoub, Solange Rocha and others. Those who follow this trend propose a historiographical review in order to perceive the existing fissures in the history of Brazil and its workers. As Chalhoub proposes, the objective is to deepen and enrich the academic production on the history of workers in Brazil, in order to provoke the revision of some classic interpretations and suggest new avenues of investigation.
It can be said that this intellectual and political effort has shaken what we call here the “paradigm of absence”. Moreover, it threatens to bring down the historiographical Berlin wall arising from the aforementioned paradigm, which still prevents the necessary dialogue between historians of slavery and scholars of the political and cultural practices of poor urban workers and the labor movement.
The revisionist productions of the 1980s and 1990s criticized the image of the enslaved person as a mere commodity of an economic system. Instead, these studies sought to understand the enslaved as an active subject inserted in complex social, ethnic and cultural relationships. These new approaches were motivated in large part by the centenary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1988, which brought to the fore debates and reflections on the legacy of slavery in Brazilian society.
Many of these studies were influenced by the English historian E. P. Thompson, whose creative reading of Marxism, supported by a wide dialogue with anthropologists, contributed to the renewal of Brazilian historiographical thought with regard to studies on slavery and workers in general. Thompson argued that history cannot be reduced to a mere succession of economic events, but that it is constructed through the actions of historical subjects, who have agency and can transform the world around them.
In the same line, the historiography of Brazilian slavery today seeks to understand the practice and functioning of slavery not only as a form of work, but also as a sociocultural system, which profoundly shaped the relations between whites and blacks in the country. According to Schwartz (2001), this new historical perspective has been able to break with old paradigms and propose new approaches to understand the complexity of Brazilian history.
Objects of compassion
Our readings on the subject followed the classic line, firstly the studies inaugurated by Gilberto Freyre, especially the work Casa Grande e Senzala, published in 1933, which refuted the inferiority of blacks and their negative contribution to the formation of the Brazilian people, defended by Nina Rodrigues and Oliveira Viana. In Freyre’s conception, the master was good and the enslaved was docile and obedient, which ended up creating an idyllic vision of our colonial past that rests on the myth of racial democracy in Brazil.
This perspective permeated the understanding that the basis of the system would be the “Brazilian patriarchal family”, a space where miscegenation between human groups would occur, a proposal that would often be interpreted, due to the author’s ambiguities, as the existence of a mild slavery in the Brazil. His ideas would strongly contribute to the consolidation of the so-called “myth of Brazilian racial democracy” and, consequently, would influence the works of North American authors, such as Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins, who contrasted the violence of North American slavery with the supposed mildness of the Brazilian slavery. [1]
Our path of research in newspapers and other sources finds contradictions in Freyre, as the marks left by the mistreatment of black workers do not suggest friendship or goodwill; proven here with the following announcements: Cristóvão ran away days ago. He was “a 24-year-old Creole slave, carpentry officer, belonging to Viriato Bandeira Duarte” “[…] beautiful figure, ordinary stature, and has a large scar measuring 4 inches on his back”. He ran away a slave from Angola in 1843, aged 25 or 30. “[…] with signs on the back, and in the accent of having been punished for a long time, in addition, he has a scar on the elbow of one arm, his legs are mainly very arched, so he puts the tip of his toes very far inward , which is commonly known as the foot of the curica”. Maria da Cruz fled. “[…] he has puffy eyes, and two large scars on his forehead, which show that they were made with a club”.
These advertisements were published between 1842 and 1844 in the newspaper Publisher Maranhense. From the printed material in that periodical, we found in the 146 runaway advertisements analyzed that the marks of violence were very present in the daily lives of those black men and women. In this way, Freyre’s work serves us to reflect on the strength of the look of the big house on the slave quarters that ends up strengthening an ideology that permeates decades, but does not attest to friendship between master and slave.
Objectified black people
In the 1950s, some works were produced which aimed to highlight the relations of production in colonial and imperial Brazil, based on studies that revealed the importance of slavery for the accumulation of capital. We understand this to be a second theoretical strand of interpretation of slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil. This aspect analyzed the enslaved worker under the strict perspective of profit. This study would come to understand and justify Brazilian slavery as the best way to produce and export primary products on a large scale and at the lowest cost. Thus, characteristics and ways of life in Brazil would be the result of the type of colonization imposed by the European economy. Thus, it would not be possible to explain the country’s situation by other factors (such as the climate or the ethnic groups that formed it), since the type of colonization we had would explain what we are.
According to Ferrari Fonseca, [2] the enslaved worker would then be the brute force, the material and essential element for carrying out the works that would move our colonization. And, in modern times, the enslaved would be just a working machine. For Caio Prado Jr., slavery was a means, an opportunity, used by Europeans to commercially exploit the vast territories and riches found in the New World.
When analyzing this second strand, it is clear that the main problem of these works is that they conceive the enslaved as objects, citing Jacob Gorender and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, among others, as representatives of this tendency. In the conception of these scholars, the enslaved person had no personality, as he was just a mere instrument, since slavery took away his ability to think and see himself as a person, as an active subject and willing to fight against his own condition of enslavement . Such analyzes are accused of promoting the objectification of the enslaved.
Still in this light, we have Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Jacob Gorender who present the concept of “colonial slave production mode”, in which they detect an internal logic of reproduction of the slave order, which opposes the way of treating Brazilian slavery, as being subjection to the external process of development of European mercantile capital. [3]
In this second aspect, there is also Emília Viotti da Costa. That, although it is one of the references we use, as we consider it obligatory in studies of slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil. This suffers from a series of criticisms, especially the book “Da senzala à Colônia”, published for the first time in 1966, when dealing with the transition from slave to free labor in the coffee areas of São Paulo, it proposes a materialist and dialectical interpretation of the process of transition from work slave to free labor. With that, in this work, the historian corroborates the view of others by defending that slavery took away from the enslaved their traditions, their conception of the world, in short, their humanity.
However, Viotti “advances” by opposing purely political explanations about abolition. For her, both the presence of white immigrants as labor and changes in means of transport (implantation of railroads), as well as the forms and transformations in coffee processing processes would also have cooperated for the end of slavery. [4]
Clovis Moura, despite the importance of his work and reference to us, especially when dealing with slave resistance, can also be considered as belonging to this second strand, because in contesting the mildness of slavery idealized by Freyre, he studied the enslaved from his rebellions. Clovis Moura [5] dealt with the Bahian revolts that occurred in the first half of the 19th century, seeking to characterize the violence of slavery, in addition to analyzing it from an eminently economic perspective.
In 1971, José Alípio Goulart publishes Da palmatória to patibulo and analyzes the spread of fear by the government of enslaved people who committed certain crimes. For Goulart, there were two main reasons for this fear, which was to satisfy the people and to frighten the enslaved when they were considered criminals.
On the subject of slave reactions or resistance, we can mention the work Palmares — the slave war, written by Décio Freitas, which, released in 1973, brings us concrete data about Zumbi and the social formation of Palmares. [6]
Still in the period of affirmation of the strand of “objectification of the enslaved”, the ideas of the Paulista School of Sociology also stood out, which studied, among other topics, the situation of Africans and their descendants and the racial prejudices existing in Brazil. This School was composed of names like Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Octávio Ianni.
In addition to these authors criticizing the idea of paternalistic slavery, as well as the existence of a racial democracy, they reinforced the thesis that the enslaved did not see himself as a historical agent. In this way, these discussions also strengthened the ongoing debate on race relations.
In summary, from the 1950s onwards, there were many studies that discussed, criticized and contested Gilberto Freyre’s ideas. For the most part, they were debates based on economicist theories to understand slavery. These ended by denying the enslaved worker his status as a historical subject, partly responsible for his own liberation throughout the entire period of criminal slavery.
In the international scenario, in the 1970s, inspired by the American civil rights movements, the historiography of that region of the Americas and studies on slavery intensified in the search to point out the place of the enslaved as a historical subject. Among the works that represent this ideology is the book The Promised Land — the world that slaves created by Eugene Genovese, originally published in 1974. [7]
In this work, Genovese used, in an innovative way for the Brazilian moment, the term paternalism, (this concept, linked to A. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony), however, this differs from the patriarchal family defended by Freyre in the 1930s in Brazil. Genovese claimed that paternalism was seen differently for slaves and masters. According to him, for the enslaved, paternalism was seen as an instrument of domination and, consequently, a way of preventing solidarity networks between blacks as a way of establishing obligations between them. Therefore, for enslaved workers, it was a negotiation to bargain for better conditions of survival within the oppressive structure.
Black people as beings of rights
The third of the strands analyzes the enslaved black worker in his diversity of legal condition, as an agent of his life, who fought for a less oppressed, less violent life. And to escape the hard line of slavery, he looked for ways to free himself from captivity.
The 1980s were fruitful for this line of thought and a great fight against the image of the enslaved as a mere commodity of an economic system emerged, seeking to understand it within social, ethnic and cultural relations. These currents are new readings that began around the centenary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil as a form of commemoration that we still celebrate today.
Briefly, the third aspect, when interpreting slavery in Brazil, defends the existence, albeit relative, of an enslaved person’s autonomy in view of his relationship with captivity; with their tormentors, in work relations at home and on the street; relationships and solidarity networks; of negotiations; in the escapes and confrontation with the police. However, even not adding the category of “class struggle”, it seeks to place it, even in part, among many other conflicts that existed throughout the existence of slave labor, and thus understand these workers in their multiple experiences. For this aspect, the focus is not on the enslaved black as an economic agent inserted in the objective conditions of production, but as a subject, that is, as a participant in slavery.
Kátia Mattoso, in the work Being a Slave in Brazil, examines what the life of enslaved people would have been like. His production covers an extensive period that goes from the 16th to the 19th century with the objective of analyzing slavery in general, starting from the point of view of the enslaved. This author talks about the reasons that led the enslaved person not to submit to the strict discipline of his master, as shown in the following fragment and also mentioned elsewhere in this work:
[…] when the black person is unable to create his necessary spaces of freedom, does not find a family, group, confraternity, entertainment of his own, then, yes, and only then, does he refuse the discipline of work and pass into the terrible domain of repulsion, of punishments, revolt. [8]
Scene from Angola and Janga. (D’Salete, 2017, p.12)
The reading of these texts, especially the third strand of studies on slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil, enabled us to understand, at different levels, the spaces for negotiations within the relations of slaveholders shaped by the oppression that was the process of enslavement that many people went through. Brazilian black men and women. We also understand that the enslaved, in their wisdom, used slavery to improve their living conditions and their own culture and family life. Our press sources indirectly pointed out an action, such as the African woman who was freed by law “[…] fled yesterday having found out about her house on Caju beach before nine o’clock at night, one of those Africans who were freed by the law.”[9]
Our understanding is that the construction of freedom by enslaved workers did not only happen through the inflamed speeches of abolitionists, but also (and mainly) was woven by the enslaved workers themselves who never, at any time during the Brazilian period of slavery, accepted passive mode to slavery. In our research on the first half of the 19th century, in Maranhão, we found advertisements of slave escapes in the Province. Advertisements that called our attention due to the character that, in our understanding, they have of the non-acceptance of slavery by the enslaved themselves. [10]
The extensive production that marks the years from 1980 to 2000, with published works that deal with the most different aspects of Brazilian black slavery, attests that the themes of the economy, quilombos, rebellions and escapes expanded and gave space to others, such as the processes for obtaining manumission and the life of the freedman, the slave family, the legislation on slavery and the use of this legislation by enslaved people, such as the enslaved black woman “Esperança Garcia” in the State of Piauí; ethnicities and identities; the relationships between enslaved and freed people, the processes of re-enslavement and freedoms, the daily life and the work relationships of those enslaved for gain, of the streets, among many others
We also emphasize the importance of the theses produced, having as a point of reflection the historiography on resistance. When we focus on the studies of Maria Helena Machado from the University of São Paulo/USP (1991) that deals with slave criminality in São Paulo plantations and that of Silvia Lara in the field of Goytacazes, we realize that the authors analyzed how violence was approached during the period of slavery, migrating to the daily relations between masters and slaves. With this, they show that there was a relative negotiation between the enslaved and their masters for the improvement of relations and life.
Thus, in a way, it is attested first that the masters knew that a slave rebellion could bring tragic consequences, especially with regard to their production. On the other hand, the enslaved were also aware of their importance for the maintenance of capital. Therefore, in some cases, there was openness to negotiations, resignified as a form of resistance according to the understanding we had.
Along the same lines, we have the important works of José Carlos Reis and Eduardo Silva (Negotiation and Conflict – black resistance in Brazil under slavery), which address the issue of slave resistance in the context of Bahian and Rio de Janeiro societies. Then, Sidney Chalhoub emerges with Visions of freedom in which he analyzed the last decades of slavery and its decline at court. In this work, Chalhoub emphasizes the different understandings of freedom on the part of the masters and the enslaved.
We agree with the perspective of Silvia Lara, Maria Helena Machado and Sidney Chalhoub, regarding considering black workers as active historical subjects and also, the practice of escapes as a form of resistance. However, we did not verify in the researched sources, negotiations, neither by parts of the enslaved, nor by the masters, in the line of Reis e Silva, even knowing that empirically this occurred.
We consider the vast academic production on slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil to be of great relevance. This work not only accepts, but uses many of the theoretical and methodological reflections, mainly in the line that seeks to recover the historical experience of enslaved and freed workers, and the political meanings of their acts and ways of living, as attested by João José Reis, Sidney Chalhoub, Leila Algranti, Silvia Lara. [11]
From the slopes to the scope spaces
We emphasize that, although the academic production on the subject of slavery against Africans and their descendants in Brazil, empire, colony and republic, with national and international expression, is wide, for the most part, it is limited to the southeast, northeast (Bahia and Pernambuco), leaving the rest of the country with timid or inexpressive production.
Our research in this field, produced on the province of Maranhão, especially with black workers in the capital, São Luís, adds to the theses of Antônia Mota (2007); Josenildo Pereira (2007); Regia Agostinho (2013) among other master’s dissertations.
In the context of the Brazilian Northeast, some research has been produced that deserves to be highlighted and inspires us to walk within our theoretical and methodological line. Solange Pereira da Rocha’s thesis, Black people in Paraíba in the 19th century, produced as part of the graduate program in history at the Federal University of Pernambuco, is one of these. Its author innovates by outlining the universe of part of the black people of the province of Paraíba, notably enslaved and non-enslaved women and men through baptism records.
Along the same lines, we also have the theses: Slavery, Freedom and Resistance in Sergipe: Cotinguiba, 1860 – 1888; [12] Representations of Slavery in the Journalistic Press of Maranhão in the 1880s; [13] The Equatorial Athena: the foundation of a Maranhão in the Brazilian empire. [14] These works, in addition to the geographical demarcation, as they are produced on the Northeast region of Brazil, with regard to the subject of slavery and work, allow us to access archives and sources that are still little explored in the Northeast and on the Northeast of Brazil. Given their importance, these are added to the studies produced in the last decades of the 20th century, as we have already highlighted Leila Algranti and Silvia Lara (1888); Correia (2011) and Santos (2013). These works are theses from the 1980s to the 2000s that point to a new prism regarding slavery that is: “slavery and power in the context of relationships”.
Conclusions
As reflexões aqui empreendidas levaram-nos a traçar um breve balanço histográfico o que nos permitiu na produção do trabalho e da pesquisa, compreender sobre a escravidão brasileira e identificar três vertentes principais de interpretação: a primeira que busca uma visão paternalista; a segunda que traz uma discussão meramente econômica do escravizado que — em linhas gerais, muitas vezes entende-o como objeto — e, por fim, a que busca compreender o escravizado como um agente de sua própria história.
Foi preciso um estudo mesmo que breve da bibliografia citada. Para tanto, tivemos que fazer escolhas e considerar as especificidades da constituição de uma cidade ao norte da região nordeste do Brasil, inserida entre o mar e rios, agraciada por uma exuberante beleza natural.
Este estudo que se encerra, foi motivado por problemas atinentes à experiência negra da cidade de São Luís do Maranhão onde nas primeiras décadas do século XIX tinha uma população estimada em trinta mil habitantes, e destes, 51% eram de africanos e seus descendentes. Nossa intenção era compreender a constituição de São Luís em conjunto com o resto do país que respiravam uma Europa mesmo nas menores províncias, e em meio a esses, conviviam com homens e mulheres negras inseridos nas categorias de escravizado enquanto objeto ou sujeitos ausentes, invisíveis. Consequentemente, era também a nossa meta enfrentar equívocos cometidos por uma historiografia mais conservadora a partir de leituras de documentos dos muitos arquivos brasileiros, insensíveis às experiências dos escravizados, enquanto sujeitos históricos na escravidão.
Vale ressaltar que ao analisar a terceira vertente dos estudos sobre a escravidão negra no Brasil pôde-se perceber que em muitos desses têm-se grande influência metodológica, sobretudo, de E. P. Thompson, historiador inglês que, embora nunca tenha estudado a escravidão do africano no Brasil, contribuiu imensamente para a renovação do pensamento historiográfico brasileiro no que diz respeito aos estudos sobre a escravidão e as classes trabalhadoras de um modo geral. Na visão de Schwartz (2001), essa nova historiografia da escravidão brasileira tenta compreender sua prática e seu funcionamento não apenas como forma de trabalho, mas também como um sistema sociocultural.
[1] For a better understanding of Freyre’s ideas, see the work Casa Grande e Senzala by this author and also Ricardo Benzaquém de Araújo, Guerra e Paz – Casa Grande e Senzala and the Work of Gilberto Freyre in the 30s, Rio de Janeiro, Ed . 34, 1994. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, New York, 1947, and Stanley Elkins, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959.
[2] Ferrari; Fonseca, 2015.
[3] Pinto, 2004.
[4] Eisenberg, 1989.
[5] Moura, 1959.
[6] Freitas, 1978, p.9.
[7] Genovese, 1978.
[8] Mattoso, 2003, p. 116.
[9] JornalPublicadorMaranhense, edição n.º 34. Sábado, 12/ 1842.
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