by Megan Pierce

Created on: June 01, 2010

Carlos Diegues’ 1984 Portuguese film, “Quilombo” contains recurring themes of social and colonialist genres which can be recognized through the interactions between the Europeans and the African peoples in Brazil. It is this ideology of Colonialism and Feminism and the interpretation of Imperialistic ideology that shapes the many internal and external conflicts in the historical film relating to the slave trade and the communities of refugees in the Palmares, known to the fugitive slaves as “the land of free men, where black men run who don’t want to be slaves.”

[1]

            In seventeenth-century Brazil, sugar was the main export of the Europeans and many sugar plantations developed in the interior, first being supported by the indigenous Natives and later by African slaves. These slaves resisted oppression by establishing several run-away slave communities called quilombos in Brazil and the most self-sufficient settlement was known as Palmares, home to at least 20,000 residents. The film “Quilombo” focuses on this refuge and centers on the political and social aspects of the communities and people who inhabited them.

            Wherever there was a slave plantation, settlements sprung up where slaves could escape from their masters. Defying Portuguese and Dutch colonialism, the community of Palmares became a military threat under leadership of Zumbi, an escaped slave who challenged the Portuguese attempts of colonizing Brazil. In Palmares, slaves established their own order of culture, “[an] autonomous society, free of slavery and of Portuguese colonialism.”[2] In the first scene of “Quilombo” a slave’s Portuguese overseer is told that “[he] will receive due punishment without danger to his life or his ability to work, and so protects his master’s property.”[3] The European’s idea that slaves are no more important than simple degradable property to them seemed to justify the Portuguese idea that Brazil and its inhabitants, including the imported African slaves, needed to be tamed under a strict colonialized society beneficial only to the European good. But because of establishments like Palmares, “its very success challenged the colonial order on the coast… and its destruction, the Portuguese hoped, would deter all other such attempts

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>