Colonialidade do poder e escravidão contemporânea na formação histórico-territorial do Brasil: passado e presente na negação da humanidade

Abstract

This research looks at the theme of slavery in Brazil in the light of the historical-territorial approach based on the coloniality of power, as a fundamental element in the subordination of the human person to the imperatives of capitalist modernization. In the current Brazilian historical-territorial context, the debate is re-emerging around one of the latent issues, still unresolved in Brazil, which is inherent in the colonial nature of the country's territorial formation process, that is, the question of slavery, which still remains as a tie to the past. Currently, the emergence of records of captivity in Brazil shows that this condition is still a mark of our historical and territorial constitution that insists on happening. In view of this problem, we draw attention to the central question guiding this research: to what extent does the current context of contemporary slavery in Brazil result from the permanence of the coloniality of power in Brazil's historical-territorial formation? The main objective of this research is to understand the current context of worsening denial and dehumanization of the Brazilian population, which is the result of the coloniality of power in Brazil's historical-territorial formation. To this end, we start from the theoretical understanding that even after the end of Portuguese rule, colonial relations, also from the perspective of the coloniality of power, continued to permanently influence the historical-territorial process of the formation of Brazil, with slavery being a condition that makes this fact explicit. The methodological procedures used were based on bibliographical and documentary research, as well as the superimposition of maps showing the current spatial distribution of enslaved populations. The main result of this research was that the logic inherent in capitalist technical-instrumental rationality, within the modern-colonial-racist system, has in the denial of diversity and in the utilitarian use of human life clear expressions of the continuity of the colonialist past marked in the present and strongly expressed in the national territory.