Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote, “The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots” (10). Lamonte Aidoo chooses this quotation to open his book Slavery Unseen. Based on the assumption that slavery was not a uniform or a singular institution, the author embarks on an analysis that seeks to uncover the roots of racism and violence that characterize Brazilian society. To that end, Aidoo chooses to examine the intricate and violent relationship that slavery established between power, sex, race, and gender in Brazil.
The choice to unveil the intimate sphere of human relations that guided the slave past and the early years of the republican experience in Brazil is not new in Brazilian historiography. The classic The Masters and the Slaves by Gilberto Freyre (published in 1933) became a fundamental study precisely because Freyre proposed an analysis of Brazilian history using the...
