The process of colonization and the economic development that followed the arrival of the Portuguese colonizers were assured by means of imposing the use of native labour force and more than four million of Africans introduced in Brazil as slaves. In order to maintain that human contingent under control and to safeguard the economic interests, corporal punishments, tortures and the execution of slaves were used throughout more than three centuries of slavery as mechanisms that assured the exploitation cycle that it had to them captured.
In this work I recover the link between violence and slavery, focusing on the analysis of the punitive mechanisms, aiming to observe how the power of the slavers was consolidated by its means to become effective the control and submission of the slaves.
The central issue of this thesis is this problem. It consider the relation between power and body not understood simply and exclusively as a violent action on slaves, but as a link that reveals a system of relations with political, economic and racial basis.
In this study is emphasised the role of repressive mechanisms and punitive modalities, seeing them as a punitive spectacle that by means of the staging of the application of physical punishments and public executions it tried to assure the submission of the slaves and the continuity of their exploitation.
In order to assure the effectiveness the control, the different violence modalities did not have to be randomly or disordered applied. In order to guarantee it, the ritual of the punishment was fundamental since it was not only a brutality discipline device, but also of the theatricalization of the power, by means of the punitive spectacle aimed to assure its effectiveness and reproduction.