Conflicting Narratives of African Body Markings and Black Corporeality in Eighteenth-Century Brazil

This chapter examines the practices of describing African body markings in Colonial Brazil and the use of slave trade brandings, shedding light on the complex and unstable process of constructing black corporeality within this context. It explores the role of African scarifications in social control practices employed by colonial agents in the mining regions, the accounting methods used in the slave trade, and the incorporation of the body into a paper trail. The chapter concludes by analyzing first-person narrative fragments left by both freed and enslaved individuals, offering insights into the meanings of body modifications and illustrating how these narratives contested the reductionist colonial gaze on their bodies.