UC San Diego

The eighteenth century in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian world was a time of depopulation anxiety and pressure towards epistemic, political, and imperial reform. Configurations of the Human tracks how the struggle to produce a new and more vigorous people dovetailed in clashes about social power and epistemic preeminence inflected in distinct worldviews about the status of the human. From an object of divine creation to a species, this dissertation tracks a shift from the dominance of religion to medicine as the dominant languages of knowledge about the natural world. The struggle for modern reform, a term used in the eighteenth century by several protagonists recovered here, hinged on an effort to replace Church power and Scholastic methods for modern medical approaches. Despite the enforcement of modern epistemic transformations, the modern medical method continued to recapitulate patriarchal models of power while simultaneously seeking to intercede with the patriarch, thus rendering him into the first agent of modern reform. Throughout five chapters, I reveal how projects of population multiplication in Lisbon traveled to the Amazon to build better population futures. I do this by theorizing the household (casa) as a patriarchal technology of medical power, race, reproduction, and political economy. Tracing the origins of state-sponsored racial whitening in Portugal and Brazil, I offer the first study of relational racial production in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic. This work historicizes the medicalization of race, “sex,” education, and patriarchal power. Conditions of possibility for whitening, I argue, stemmed from theories of generation positing “male seed” as the active seat of logos and female “wombs” as passive matter. Under the rule of white patriarchs, subalterns in Portugal and Amerindians in the Amazon would metamorph into “white vassals.” However, the population’s procreative imperative also inflicted exclusions. Namely, female same-sex desire became a cognitive impossibility for its refusal of reproductive futurity. Similarly, Blackness also became incommensurate with Portuguese civilization. Showing how abolitionism hinged on Portugal’s whitening—the “blackest” European capital—I analyze how the pathologization of Black women was critical to preserving South Atlantic slavery at a time of rising abolitionist pressures