About

Goals and Structure

This project aims to expand traditional conceptions of the archive and incorporate sources and resources typically not juxtaposed against early modern materials. This website collates primary sources and accounts of the Dutch and Portuguese in the 1640s; drawings, prints, and paintings produced by colonial artists in the same period; early modern and modern maps of Palmares and Brazil; contemporary images of the Quilombo dos Palmares; contemporary performances and visual cultures that provide a window into Palmares; references to other relevant digital sources; secondary source literature from a variety of disciplines; and explicit absences impossible to be added to the historical record. This wide range of material can be found by navigating through the various pages that I have constructed: the Archive, Digital Humanities Resources, and Reading Material.

The archival materials are organized into a grid of 3 posts across. Each post is given a featured image to assist viewers in making visual connections among unexpected sources. The grid is additionally structured so that the posts visually evoke the letter “Z,” in reference to Zumbi, the last leader of Palmares at the moment of its destruction in 1694. By organizing the posts in this way, I hope to index the overwhelming presence of the colonial gaze in the archive of both Quilombo dos Palmares and early modern Brazil. Given the absence of records about Palmares and other subaltern communities in Brazil, it is impossible to avoid colonial archives and their violences in creating a history of the period. I hope to responsibly contend with this issue through this project.

I lastly want to note that this project is only a beginning. It will be a constantly evolving resource that documents material as I find it and am able to upload it in the proper structure. The project has no end date and no end point. I make no assertions that I could ever truly capture the Quilombo dos Palmares. I instead intend to provide a way through which this fugitive community can be thought around, honored, and acknowledged in a creative approach that challenges the traditional methodologies predominantly employed in the subfield of early modern art history.

Key Questions

How can a fugitive community be integrated into the art historical record without perpetuating efforts of capture and containment? What can we learn about a community that is almost entirely invisible in the historical record with very few remaining material traces by looking at the types of visual evidence that surrounded it? How can we shift focus on the production and reception of visual culture away from the European continent to fully encompass the networks that bound the Dutch Republic with Brazil? How can we as art historians center the lived experiences of marginalized people in the works taht were created in or about Brazil? In what ways can an archive present a visual environment that was not recorded in colonial images? What is our duty as historians to reconstruct invisible histories through our archival practices? What could it change about the nature of the stories we tell about art and European colonialism if the narrative center shifted away from colonizers?

Parameters

Given that Quilombo dos Palmares existed for almost the entirety of the seventeenth century, placing boundaries around this project has been no easy task. First and foremost, this archive is interested in interrogating the relationship of Palmares to the regime of the Dutch colonial government from 1624 to 1654. This comes personally out of my own interests as a scholar of Northern European art and practically as a result of the high artistic production of the Dutch colonial period. Given the sheer numbers involved in the creation of drawings, prints, and paintings of Dutch Brazil, the archive for the moment concentrates especially on the 1640s. The 1640s was a turning point for Dutch Brazil as it marked the end of Johan Maurits’s tenure as governor and the beginning of renewed aggression from the Portuguese. It also witnessed three different expeditions of the Dutch against Palmares, creating direct links between the community and Dutch colonial culture. Delimiting the project to such a short span of time necessarily omits some Portuguese material that would be helpful for future research. For now, this project focuses primarily on the Dutch period as their artists produced the most work in Brazil that can be analyzed in conjunction with what is known of Palmares.