Unpacking “race” and “modernity”: Portuguese expansion and difference-making at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade

• In Event: Rethinking Theories of Gender, Race, and Sexuality from Anti-, De-, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

Based on a qualitative content analysis of administrative documents from the Portuguese empire in West and West Central Africa in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, this paper examines the relationship between categories associated with color, categories indicating slavery, and processes of social differentiation, marking, abstraction and dehumanization. I link these categories and 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 contributes to conceptual and methodological debates surrounding “race” and “modernity”. Rather than engaging with definitional debates, I focus on tracking historically some of the processes of social differentiation and subject-making—and their entanglements with broader logics commodification, capital accumulation and state expansion—that have been highlighted by theories of race and/or modernity.

Author

• Luisa Farah Schwartzman, University of Toronto