Names and Histories

The most obvious and gaping absence that will never be filled is the identities of the Palmarinos who lived and died in the forest, mere miles away from the Dutch and the Portuguese, but under their own agency. That so little has survived of this community makes it especially easy for a discipline like art history to ignore their existence and relegate them to a footnote of irrelevance in tellings of colonial art. In this imaginary, I ask, what would happen if we invented a name, a story, to put to the faces that we see in the art of the Dutch? What would happen if we imagined their faces for ourselves, completely separate from any contemporaneous artistic production? What does it do to allow a fugitive woman to re-enter the art historical record by giving her a space that she did not have? Do we dishonor history or do we instead open up a path of resistance within a tradition that is dominated by oppression and racism? Do we allow for the possibility of Black and Brazilian and indigenous people to see themselves in a century that is committed to casting them as an unwanted and inhuman other and to reclaim a history through the imaginative creation of an alternative archive? If we imagined names and lives and loves for the Palmarinos, how would our orientation to them change? If we had these stories that never even made it into scholarship and only stayed in the realms of our imagination, what would happen to our research and our scholarship and our writing on Palmares or on early modern Brazil or on colonial art in general? The imaginary can often do what the real cannot.