The Portuguese‑Brazilian Plantation System: Administration of Terror and Agency

The aim of this essay, as a part of a contextualising introduction to the analysis of denial in recent Portuguese historical novels related to the plantation system, is to present a set of crucial historical elements on the Portuguese-Brazilian slavocrat social formation of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This essay challenges the representations of the Africans as subjects who accept passively the deep injustices of the slave condition under the Portuguese plantation system of so-called patriarchal rule. The essay reminds us of the historical context of both the terror and the permanent resistance, ever since the deportation, and contradicts both the way the Portuguese system is depicted as harmonious and the way that the slaves are presented as unable to question or overcome their objectified status. This incapacity, in the texts of imperial revivalism, appears directly related to the assumption that abolition was a struggle and an achievement of late eighteenth century enlightened sectors of European societies. The essay concludes that the reification of inequality, injustice and lack of agency is directly projected on the colonized descendants by present-day discursive forms of coloniality which shape contemporary Portuguese multicultural society.