Brazilian slave rebellions of 1808-35 shattered the docility myth

Evidence

And, as we have already suggested, the collective myth denied the possibility of African resistance to slavery through its reliance on manageable characteristics: “docility” and “enterprising.” This was made possible, perhaps, by the fact that “the basic form of slave resistance” up to this moment had been quilombos, a habit that physically removed recalcitrant Africans from the society of whites. But though the legend is still maintained in some circles of Brazilian intelligentsia, in the first third of the nineteenth century it was shattered. By the mid-nineteenth century, Joao Pandia Calogeras comments, “The Negroes came to be regarded as a dangerous element in the population, a menace to the lives and safety of their masters.” Rollie Poppino concurs, noting: “[T]he sharp rise in the number of slaves raised the specter of Negro rebellions,” and moreover, “the steady increase in the Negro sector of the population was [seen to be] undermining the basically European culture of Brazil.” Though the details of the historical events that account for this change of attitude are still not entirely agreed upon or mastered, the broader character of those events is known. They were, as suggested, the rebellions of the 1808–35 period. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 760

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which specific rebellions of 1808-35 constitute this shattering? The author gestures at events but names none here — worth chasing for the Black radical tradition’s actual Brazilian upturn.
• XREF: Racial ideology collapsing under actual rebellion parallels how Indian caste/docility myths broke under revolt; connects to the broader pattern that violence forces dominant groups to abandon beliefs about subject peoples.