Absences: Written Documentation

This archive will incorporate acknowledgments of the absences that obfuscate our understanding of Palmares and its impact on seventeenth-century colonial actors. While we cannot create an archive out of nothing, we can attempt to cast light on the invisible and ensure that we remain aware of the colonial creators of the primary source documents and images that are extant today.

Perhaps the most prominent absence to be addressed is the complete lack of written documentation by any member of the Palmares society throughout the seventeenth century. All primary source accounts are written by Dutch and Portuguese colonial antagonizers, who sought out Palmares in order to wage war and destroy it. Secondary sources today derive their understanding and attempt to make deductions about Palmarian society based on these accounts. This has led to a vast amount of disagreement among scholars, who emphasize the African character of Palmares or its pluralistic ethnic makeup, who characterize it as a republic or as a monarchy, and so on.

Without writings from the Palmarians themselves, these debates will likely continue. Regardless of which positions scholars choose to support, we must keep in mind that the voices of the Palmarians themselves are inescapably absent in the record.