Colonialism in Mendes Leal and Gomes de Amorim

The expansion of faith and empire

Abstract

Sustained by the expansion of faith principle, colonization in Brazil was characterized by ethnocide and epistemicide, the depreciation, often at the expense of its elimination, of the culture of the original peoples, who were to submit to the imposition of religion and the colonist’s way of life. The purpose of this article is to analyze two little known 19th century Portuguese novels that deal with the theme of colonization in Brazil, to understand the presence of the ideology that defended the “civilizing mission” in vogue in the 19th century:
Calabar: história brasileira do século XVII (1863), by Mendes Leal, and Os selvagens (1875), by Gomes de Amorim.