ABSTRACT

This article analyzes new dimensions of the process of racialization in eighteenth-century Brazil. It argues that colonial society did not racialize Africans as a homogeneous mass but used several social technologies to make sense of the diversity of their origins. The creation of blackness involved an intense production of knowledge on their origins by means of cultural and visual markers (mainly scarification) associated with the stereotyping label ‘nação’ (nation), and at the same time the use of phenotypic markers that functioned as common denominators of their difference from Europeans. The article contends that these two dimensions of the construction of African difference were not successive, as if one were a stage of the other, as if society first dealt with the diversity of origins and then reduced them to the category ‘negro’. In fact these two instances were interdependent, relational, and hence facets of the same historical phenomenon.

摘要

本文分析了18世纪巴西种族化进程的新维度。它认为，殖民社会并未将非洲人作为一个同质的种族而种族化，而是使用了几种社会技术来理解其起源的多样性。黑色的产生涉及与刻板印象标签“ nação ”相关的文化和视觉标记（主要是划痕），从而大量产生其起源的知识。'（民族），同时使用表型标记作为区别于欧洲人的共同标准。该文章认为，非洲差异建设的这两个方面不是连续的，好像一个阶段是另一个阶段，好像社会首先处理起源的多样性，然后将它们归为“黑人”一类。实际上，这两种情况是相互依存的，相互关联的，因此是同一历史现象的各个方面。