Beyond White and Black

Brotherhood, Festivals and Pardo Alterity in Colonial Brazil

Abstract

On September 13, 1745, the pardo brotherhood of Our Lady of Deliverance of Recife, in collaboration with the similarly brown-robed brotherhood of Our Lady of Guadalupe, from neighboring Olinda, enchanted the largest city in Pernambuco with a grand public festival in honor of the then Blessed Gonçalo Garcia, beatified in 1627. Here we study this as a staging of brown otherness by the brown brothers. In selecting the components of the procession (triumphal floats, allegorical figures, music, and dances), the brown brothers chose elements from both their paternal and maternal cultures, but also elements and forms with which this group had already identified, thus staging their own identity. This identity challenges the equation of otherness with a black-white duality and invites us to rethink colonial identities and to rethink the identities that colonial subjects articulated, such as the mulatto, which, however, will also remain outside this paradigm and this article.