Cordial Colonialism
Emphasising the centrality of racial violence in Brazilian colonial history, even with respect to the enslavement of Amerindians and Africans, has not always seemed defensible. Interpreters of the Brazilian past tenaciously resisted this view.
Myopic scholars and other apologists described the nation born of more than three centuries of Portuguese rule as a beacon of racial harmony, the product of an exceptionally permissive, multicultural form of colonialism. Mariners, traders and settlers, they maintained, mixed liberally with the colony's aboriginal occupants and then fashioned a comparatively mild form of slavery.This defanging of the Portuguese colonial project gained its most famous champion in the 1930s in the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who coined the term ‘luso-tropicalism' to describe what he construed as Portugal's distinctive imperial conduct.[71] Considered ahead of his time for embracing racial mixture or mestifagem as a defining and positive characteristic of Brazilian history and culture, Freyre nonetheless was prone to stereotypes and sweeping pronouncements that now seem quite startling. Describing the onset of colonisation, for instance, he declared: ‘The milieu in which Brazilian life began was one of sexual intoxication.' He mused about the ‘charms of the woman of color: charms to which so many Portuguese surrendered in the tropics'. As colonists, the Portuguese distinguished themselves by ‘not seeking to submit [non-Europeans] ethnically, socially, and culturally', but by way of ‘temporization... resulting in symbiosis'. Although slavery was widespread, it was a ‘patriarchal' rather than ‘industrial' form of slavery, a ‘system of social security' for those drawn into the lusophone world.[72]
Luso-tropicalism caught on quickly in Brazil and beyond, tracing a reverse trajectory across and around the Atlantic.
After some initial wariness, because the theory posited his nation's preternatural affinity for miscegenation, the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (r. 1932-68) embraced Freyre's ideas in the 1950s to bolster popular support for the maintenance of colonies in Africa and Asia. Luso-tropicalism also influenced those whose fascination with modern Brazil's striking colour continuum and inter-ethnic sociability blinded them to the nation's persistent racial inequality. Foreign scholars misdiagnosed the sexual abuse endemic in unequal colonial social relations as benign libidinous exuberance and, implicitly or explicitly, as tolerance for racial intermingling. ‘The Portuguese image of Brazil was from the beginning erotic', wrote a leading American Brazilianist in 1999, channelling Freyre in a widely used English-language textbook. Other scholars contrasted the Portuguese inclination towards alliance and collaboration with the Spanish predisposition for war and conquest.[73] These formulations implied that human difference mattered little and that violence constituted a last resort in the colonisation of Portuguese America.With increasing insistence during the second half of the twentieth century, scholars and social critics worked to dismantle these conceptual relics. Researchers emerged from the archives with mounting evidence of the bedrock status of brutality, bloodshed and generalised coercion in Portuguese relations with Indians, Africans and their multi-ethnic descendants. Such work demonstrated the pervasive intimidation required to compel the collaboration and mestigagem enshrined as the essence of Portuguese practice. This
Race and Violence in Portuguese America scholarship has revealed Brazil's importance as an early modern crucible of violence predicated on hardening conceptions of the incommensurability of peoples of different origin, creed and colour.
In this revisionist project, there was no need to discount evidence of innumerable instances of coexistence, which, after all, was a feature of virtually every colonising venture throughout history.
As elsewhere, the church and the crown established parameters restricting the application of violence. Violence was never the only tool available to colonisers. It need not have been so to have had an outsize effect. For, crucially, authorities also defined when violence was justifiable and necessary. The result was a conviction among colonisers that coercive measures were employed as a last resort, in moderation, and only when legally and morally permissible. This view proved central to the pedagogical uses of violence.Upon reflection, the application of force as a form of instruction will not seem surprising. Sanctioned violence frequently rests on the conviction that it teaches a lesson. When the colonised cannot be civilised by culture, Partha Chatterjee observes, they must be disciplined by force.[74] Both elements intertwined in Portuguese America, but the civilising, acculturative discourse of collaboration and miscegenation predominated in histories of the colonial past, obscuring the prevalence of racial violence. To reveal it need not entail reimagining Brazil's mythical racial paradise as an unmitigated inferno. This opposing exaggeration tilts towards a new Black Legend of the kind northern Europeans crafted to smear Spanish imperial history as uniquely inhumane.[75] Luso-tropicalism, with its idealised narrative of a tropical colony constructed cooperatively by Indians, Africans and Europeans, could not have gained the traction it did without a certain basis in historical fact. In fact, it was a formulation inherited from the first colonists and royal authorities who sought to direct events on the ground. The insistence on amicable racial relations constituted a colonial ideology before it became a postcolonial salve.