Beyond “race” and “modernity”: technologies, practices and categories of difference-making at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade

Luisa Farah Schwartzman, University of Toronto

This paper draws on an analysis of archival data to investigate the interplay of logics of commodification, capital accumulation and state expansion associated with the making of early modern Portuguese Atlantic empire and of the Atlantic slave trade, and the various processes of classification, embodied marking and dehumanization that contemporary scholars often describe under the umbrella of “racialization.” The paper is based on a qualitative content analysis of letters and bureaucratic documents written by Portuguese state authorities and colonial officials regarding their activities in West and West Central Africa between the late 15th and the early 16th centuries, as well as a smaller number of letters from African elites to Portuguese authorities. The documents analyzed are drawn from the Monumenta Missionaria Africana, a collection of transcriptions of primary sources that are faithful to the original wording and spelling. I examine the use of categories associated with color (such as branco, preto and negro), similarly positioned labels such as mouro (“moor”), and categories indicating slavery (especially escravo and peça). I investigate how and when these categories relate to each other, and to processes of social differentiation, marking, abstraction and dehumanization. I link these processes to struggles for power and social and territorial control associated with Portuguese political and economic expansion into the African Atlantic. Beyond refining the historical narrative of the emergence of social differentiation at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, the paper aims to contribute to more conceptual and methodological debates surrounding “race”, “modernity” and the relationship between them. Rather than engaging with definitional debates surrounding these topics (whether “race” is “modern” depends on how you define these two words), I focus on tracking historically some of the processes of social differentiation and subject-making that have been highlighted by theories of race and/or modernity.

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 Presented in Session 67. Racial Projects and the Administrative State