17th century Pernambuco, a north-eastern captaincy of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, was marked by the presence of an insurgent counter-society, founded in the hinterland by rebel slaves. For about a century this community, today known as the Quilombo of Palmares, persisted as a space of autonomy within the society of the plantation colony. Eventually Palmares succumbed to the invading Portuguese, but the Quilombo and its last major leader, Zumbi dos Palmares, live on in memory. In the beginning of the 20th century, as the predominant concepts of nationhood shifted towards the idea of an ethnically "mixed" nation, social groups, that had so far been excluded from political participation, began to organize and articulate their social interests more visibly. In this contect activists from two emerging political movements, a nationalist black movement (the Frente Negra Brasileira) and the Brazilian communist movement (the Partido Comunista Brasileiro), appropriated the memory of Palmares in order to signify their respective political projects. While the conservative black movement presented Zumbi as Symbol of an authoritarian Tradition, the communist movement put forward a representation of Zumbi as revolutionary leader of a primitive-communist republic. Each version represented a radically different vision of black liberation: assimilation within the Brazilian nation by proving their patriotic values or autonomy within a project of black national liberation. The proposed presentation would show, what roles the memory of Palmares played in this concurrence for the hearts and minds of the urban black population, how this memory was mediated and to what closure the underlying conflict eventually came.
