Un-servile Servants: Misfits of the Azorean Diaspora in Charles Expilly’s <i>Le Brésil tel qu’il est</i> (1862)

Abstract

Focusing on the “problem” of domestic un-governability in mid-century Brazil, this essay discloses early stereotypes of white (Portuguese Azorean) servants as arrogant, lazy and self-interested. If, on one hand, such degrading stereotypes provided elite Brazilians with what Michael Pickering has called a “comfort of inflexibility,” on the other hand, these representations also shed light on the vulnerability of employers’ domestic authority and social-conflict management in post-colonial Brazil, particularly in the decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in 1888.