The Dance of the Tapuya: On the Cultural Coding of Skin Colour in the Early Modern Period

This lecture will show how European perceptions of skin colour increasingly began to influence European perceptions of non-European ‘aliens’. Peter Burschel will argue that it was not until the sixteenth century that skin was seen as a ‘supra-individual’ distinguishing characteristic that made it possible to structure, classify, and, not least, to hierarchize intercultural encounters chromatically.