Friday, February 28, 2025 at 4:00 pm
FREE
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls present
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
How did early moderns learn to harm others who looked different from themselves? Brazil warrants a more prominent place in our attempt to understand the history of racialization. Colonizing South America, the Portuguese gave Europe a pernicious archetype of Indigenous alterity based on encounters with coastal Tupi-speakers. Brazilian plantation and mining export economies received, then consumed, more African bodies than any other American slave system. Langfur explores how the Portuguese devised an early, transatlantic form of what he calls “coercive pedagogy,” imposing what we now construe as racial hierarchies during a time when race remained an exceedingly uncommon social construct.
A historian of early Brazil and the Portuguese Atlantic world, Hal Langfur is the author of the prize-winning study Adrift on an Inland Sea: Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands (Stanford, 2023) and The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 – 1830 (Stanford, 2006). Among other publications, he edited and contributed to Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500 – 1900 (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). His current book project is titled “Pedagogies of Racial Violence in Colonial Brazil.”