Scholars@Hallwalls: Hal Langfur
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Join us for Scholars@Hallwalls! Complimentary wine and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q+A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camaraderie and conversation, but you can also livestream the event via the Hallwalls website.
Hal Langfur
Fashioning Racial Enmity in Colonial Brazil
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.”
