Palmares shines bright in the Black history of Brazil. The legendary maroon society in the mountains of northeast Brazil lasted nearly a century, a beacon of resistance that withstood numerous Portuguese attacks until its demise instigated by the murder of its leader, Zumbi, on November 20, 1695. While many narratives of Palmares have ended there, Marc Hertzman invites us to think otherwise: to view its destruction as a starting point for different futures. “What did Palmares make?” he asks.
The rest of the book traces the multiple paths the author follows in pursuit of answers, a journey that takes him from the archives of Alagoas to the rivers of Rio Grande do Norte. Guiding his way are what he calls the layered diasporas emerging from Palmares, consisting of prisoners and refugees, soldiers and descendants, who kept memories of the maroon society and its legendary leader alive even as contemporaries and later generations would manipulate their meanings.
Imagining the afterlives of Palmares means reconsidering established narratives and chronologies, which Hertzman undertakes by expanding the temporal scope from the seventeenth century to the present. If meditations on the afterlife of slavery have sparked intense conversation within and beyond the academy, here he considers what he calls Palmares’s “inheritance,” one that is etched into the landscape as much as in the fleeting examples of lives uprooted by Palmares’s fall. This is painstaking work of combing through colonial documents in search of the faint traces of unknown women, men, and children who were kidnapped or taken prisoner and trafficked as far as Lisbon because their continuing presence was deemed a threatening reminder of Palmares’s endurance, trapping them in a liminal space between survival and captivity. They force the difficult question of how the Palmaristas then, and those of us studying Palmares’s history now, can imagine freedom after its destruction.
The afterlives of Zumbi are complex, as is expected of a nearly mythological figure. Already during his lifetime, rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated. Soldiers—Black, Indigenous, and White—all invented tales of their capturing and killing the famed leader to reap valuable rewards, which White soldiers could translate into wealth and prestige they could pass down to their descendants but their Black and Indigenous counterparts not so much. Zumbi’s meanings and legacies entered a new area of contestation at the turn of the twentieth century, when prominent scholars such as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues sought to define what Zumbi (and related terms) signified—a power-laden practice based on silencing other forms of knowledge including the stories told by his own Black female caregivers. Zumbi’s significance, Hertzman shows, is a battle over whose memories and stories are allowed to be told. Many decades before becoming the symbol of Black consciousness, Zumbi and Palmares were seen as an “African cyst” whose removal was necessary for the advancement of Brazilian civilization.
Hertzman also investigates the Indigenous history of Palmares beyond a token nod to their presence. The wars against Palmares were deeply entangled with wars of Indigenous pacification, but the author complicates the narrative of colonial violence by documenting the Indigenous soldiers who participated in the wars against Palmares, culminating in a poignant history of their subsequent dispossession as their service was erased, their lands invaded, and their aldeias dismantled well into the postcolonial nineteenth century. While the Indigenous do not figure prominently in the book, their histories allow this book to challenge the “Africa in the Americas” framework that continues to dominate many understandings of Palmares.
A book of capacious ambition, After Palmares at times struggles to define its broader interventions. For readers without prior knowledge of Palmares or Brazil, some of the deep historiographic discussions—on the potential impact of the Imbangala society or specific colonial texts, for instance—may seem esoteric. Larger debates and stakes framing the discussions would help connect this material more easily to a broader readership. This was particularly the case with diaspora, one of the book’s central concepts. Hertzman’s assertion that Palmares is not only a site of the African diaspora but is in itself generative of multiple, layered diasporas propels this book. Beyond the general idea of dispersal from Palmares, however, the analytical role of diaspora was not always evident, for example, in phrases such as “White veterans…participated in…helping propel expressions of diaspora forward.” (287). Is having lived in, or conquered, Palmares and then dispersed enough to connect the histories of conqueror and conquered through a shared origin story?
For all its unparalleled place in Brazilian history, Palmares has not enjoyed a great impact beyond it. In directing our gaze to its various afterlives, Hertzman presents a welcome pathway to think about what Palmares made, taking us beyond the mountains of northeast Brazil to the broader Americas and African diaspora.
