It's certainly possible to suggest some historiographical resources in English, but I think that to really engage with a topic like this at any level of detail you'd need to be able to read in Portuguese as well. A broad starter resource is Gyan Prakash's chapter "Brazilian historical writing" in Scheider & Woolf, The Oxford History of Historical Writing Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2011). Among other things, this notes:

As Brazilian academia expanded after 1960, Brazilian historical work reflected the larger patterns in Europe and the United States—the turn toward social and economic history and the influence of Marxism. Labour, workers, slaves, natives, families, and women became the focus of a growing body of historical writing, increasingly produced by academic historians. The work of Edgard Carone on labour, Boris Fausto on daily life, and Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco on slavery and free labour, are typical examples of these trends. One of the most influential works, Emilia Viotti da Costa’s Da senzala col nia [From Slave Quarters to Colony] brought the study of slavery in Brazil to new levels of rigour and analysis. Soon after the military coup, da Costa moved to Yale University, and over the next thirty years trained a number of outstanding historians who now teach and train historians in major graduate programmes in the United States (such as Yale, Wisconsin, Duke, New York University)...

One of the striking features of the historical work produced in Brazil is a long tradition of outstanding scholarship that ignores traditional academic and disciplinary boundaries. Among the most heavily studied areas in these decades were slavery, plantation societies, race and relations, immigration, social rebellions, and labour. A number of Brazilian scholars did their doctoral work in the United States, and in the succeeding decades moved easily between the academic community there and in Brazil. Two prominent examples are Joao José Reis (and his work on slavery), and José Murilo de Carvalho, whose work has ranged across the past two centuries, including analyses of social revolts, imperial politics, and citizenship. (Reis did his doctoral work at the University of Minnesota and Carvalho at Stanford University.)

Brazilian historians have made major contributions over the last half‐century to studies of slavery and race relations. Gilberto Freyre’s classic work from the 1930s was for many years the dominant view of Brazilian slavery outside Brazil. In many ways the ongoing criticism of Freyre’s vision of a benign form of slavery and race relations stimulated decades of works after 1960. Brazilian historians such as Joao José Reis, Emília Viotti da Costa, Kátia de Queirós Mattoso, and Júnia Ferreira Furtado were not only influential figures within the Brazilian academic community, but also shaped studies of slavery among European, North American, and Latin American historians.

With those names kept in mind, perhaps then look at Jean Hébrard's “L’esclavage au Brésil: le débat historiographique et ses racines,” in his Brésil : Quatre Siècles d’Esclavage. Nouvelles Questions, Nouvelles Recherches, (Paris: Karthala & CIRESC, 2012) pp.7-61. The University of Michigan has handily published a translation of this chapter on its Translating the Americas portal, and it can be accessed here. Hebard goes into some detail about the Sao Paolo school, the proto-peasantry debate, the nature of slave resistance at Palmares, and several other key disputes in this field.