Refusing the Fictions of Unmarked Whiteness: Challenging Human Rank, Race, and History

Abstract

The 2017 inauguration of a statue in Lisbon, Portugal, to the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary in colonial Brazil, Father António Vieira, offers an opportunity to discuss history writing as a narrative genre. The statue epitomizes the naturalization of Portugal’s imperial narrative genres of history writing, instantiating their recapitulation into the future. Vieira’s statue exposes how colonial mythologies constitute a narrative of power premised on the erasure of colonial resistance. These dynamics, I argue, are intrinsic to the history of history writing. They arch back to a panegyric tradition of narrating the past that emerged in the eighteenth century in the Portuguese Royal Academy of History. Confronting eighteenth-century fictions demands exposing the epistemic whiteness undergirding Western exercises of recovery of the past and narrating history. Focusing on History as a genre, and its attending exercises of curatorial knowledge-production, exposes the deliberate erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized agents of anti-colonial resistance.