Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction

Cambridge University Press
April 2018
400 pages
233 x 165 x 43 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107177628
Paperback ISBN: 9781316630662
eBook ISBN: 9781316835890

Editors:

Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region’s long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.

• Presents systematic and synthetic overviews of recent scholarship on topics of major importance in the field of Afro-Latin American studies, for example Afro-Latin American religions, Afro-Latin American political movements, and Afro-Latin American music
• Covers a broad range of topics, embracing most of the humanities and social sciences
• Serves as the authoritative introduction for Afro-Latin American history, covering the period from 1500 to the present

Table of Contents

• 1. Afro-Latin American studies: an introduction Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews
• Part I. Inequalities:
  • 2. The slave trade to Latin America: a historiographical assessment Roquinaldo Ferreira and Tatiana Seijas
  • 3. Inequality: race, class, gender George Reid Andrews
  • 4. Afro-indigenous interactions, relations, and comparisons Peter Wade
  • 5. Law, silence, and racialized inequalities in the history of Afro-Brazil Brodwyn Fischer, Keila Grinberg and Hebe Mattos
• Part II. Politics:
  • 6. Currents in Afro-Latin American political and social thought Frank Guridy and Juliet Hooker
  • 7. Rethinking black mobilization in Latin America Tianna Paschel
  • 8. ‘Racial democracy’ and racial inclusion: hemispheric histories Paulina Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
• Part III. Culture:
  • 9. Literary liberties: the authority of Afrodescendant authors Doris Sommer
  • 10. Afro-Latin American art Alejandro de la Fuente
  • 11. A century and a half of scholarship on Afro-Latin American music Robin Moore
  • 12. Afro-Latin American religions Stephan Palmié and Paul Christopher Johnson
  • 13. Environment, space and place: cultural geographies of colonial Afro-Latin America Karl Offen
• Part IV. Transnational Spaces:
  • 14. Transnational frames of Afro-Latin experience: evolving spaces and means of connection, 1600–2000 Lara Putnam
  • 15. Afro-Latinos: speaking through silences and rethinking the geographies of blackness Jennifer A. Jones

African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World

Cambria Press
428 pages
2015-02-06
6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Case Laminate
ISBN: 9781604978926

Edited by:

Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

This book explores the history of African tangible and intangible heritages and its links with the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. The two countries are deeply connected, given how most enslaved Africans, forcibly brought to Brazil during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, were from West Central Africa. Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade and was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. Today, other than Nigeria, the largest population of African descent is in Brazil. Yet it was only in the last twenty years that Brazil’s African heritage and its slave past have gained greater visibility. Prior to this, Brazil’s African heritage and its slave past were completely neglected.

Even after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, African culture continued to be marginalized. Carnival, religious festivals, as well as Candomblé ceremonies, and capoeira (an Afro-Brazilian martial art) created important spaces of black assertion and insurgency. These cultural traditions were contested by white elites and public authorities, but starting in the 1930s, capoeira became a national symbol and Candomblé temples were gradually officially added to Brazil’s list of heritage sites.

In spite of these developments, the Atlantic slave past has remained absent from the public landscape of Brazilian and Angolan former slave ports, suggesting how difficult it is for these countries to address the painful legacies of slavery. African art and material culture also continued to be excluded from museums and other official institutions. In the rare instances that African artifacts were shown, they would be confined to only certain places dedicated to popular culture and associated with the religious sphere.

Even though public attention on slavery was growing internationally through national and international initiatives (e.g., The Slave Route Project by UNESCO), Brazil and Angola developed very few initiatives for the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. This has started to change slowly in the last decade as Brazil has begun engaging in more initiatives to memorialize slavery and underscore the importance of its African heritage.

Brazil’s slave past and African heritage are emerging gradually in urban and rural areas through different kinds of initiatives led not only by activists but also by scholars in association with black communities. Although in their early stages, most of these projects are permanent programs supported by official agencies. This new configuration suggests that––unlike the case in Angola––in Brazil, slavery and the Atlantic the slave trade are becoming recognized as foundational chapters of the country’s history.

This is the first book in English to focus on African heritage and public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. This interdisciplinary study examines visual images, dance, music, oral accounts, museum exhibitions, artifacts, monuments, festivals, and others forms of commemoration to illuminate the social and cultural dynamics that over the last twenty years have propelled––or prevented––the visibility of African heritage (and its Atlantic slave trade legacy) in the South Atlantic region.

The book makes a very important contribution to the understanding of the place of African heritage and slavery in the official history and public memory of Brazil and Angola, topics that remain understudied. The study’s focus on the South Atlantic world, a zone which is sparsely covered in the scholarly corpus on Atlantic history, will further research on other post-slave societies.

African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World is an important book for African studies and Latin American studies. It is especially valuable for African Diaspora studies, African history, Atlantic history, history of Brazil, history of slavery, and Caribbean history.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Introduction: Wounded Pasts: Memory of Slavery and African Heritage in Brazil (Ana Lucia Araujo)
• Chapter 1: Collectionism and Colonialism: The Africana Collection at Brazil’s National Museum (Rio de Janeiro) (Mariza de Carvalho Soares)
• Chapter 2: Race and Visual Representation: Louis Agassiz and Hermann Burmeister (Maria Helena Machado)
• Chapter 3: Counter-Witnessing the Visual Culture of Brazilian Slavery (Matthew Francis Rarey)
• Chapter 4: Angola in Brazil: The Formation of Angoleiro identity in Bahia (Matthias Röhrig Assunção)
• Chapter 5: Memories of Captivity and Freedom in São José da Serra Jongo Festivals: Cultural Heritage and Black Identity (1888–2011) (Martha Abreu and Hebe Mattos)
• Chapter 6: From Public Amnesia to Public Memory: Re-Discovering Slavery Heritage in Rio de Janeiro (André Cicalo)
• Chapter 7: Uncomfortable Pasts: Talking About Slavery in Angola (Marcia C. Schenck and Mariana P. Candido)
• Chapter 8: “Bahia is a Closer Africa”: Brazilian Slavery and Heritage in African American Roots Tourism (Patricia de Santana Pinho)
• Chapter 9: Preserving African Art, History, and Memory: The AfroBrazil Museum (Kimberly Cleveland)
• Chapter 10: The Legacy of Slavery in Contemporary Brazil (Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos)
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors

‘Pretos’ and ‘Pardos’ between the Cross and the Sword: Racial Categories in Seventeenth Century Brazil

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 80 (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
pages 43-55

Hebe Mattos, Professor of History and Coordinator of the LABHOI/UFF Memory of Slavery Oral History Project
University Federal Fluminense, Brazil

This paper discusses the meanings of ‘race’ in the Portuguese empire on the basis of two historical case studies. The twin processes of miscegenation, in the biological sense, and cultural intermixing has engendered intermediate strata that have long stimulated the imagination of historians. In Brazilian historiography, considerable emphasis has been given to the invention of the ‘mulato’, as proposed by Alencastro (2000, 345-356), and the ethnogenesis of the ‘pardo’ in Portuguese America, as described in an article by Schwartz (1996). Compared to these interpretations of the emergence of these intermediate categories in Portuguese America, the two cases presented here appear to suggest a more central role for the early demographic impact of access to manumission in colonial society and the possibilities for social mobility among the free peoples of African descent.

Europeans and Africans in the Portuguese Empire

Mixing between Europeans and Africans in the Portuguese Empire produced hierarchical categories for racial gradations during the seventeenth century. Only in this period were the categories ‘mulato’ and ‘pardo’ included in the regulations for Purity of Blood (Estatutos de Pureza de Sangue), which determined who could have access to the same honours and privileges that the old Christian Portuguese received. From the seventeenth century onwards, those regulations stipulated that ‘no one of the race of Jew, Moor or Mulato’ (Raça alguma de Judeu, Mouro ou Mulato) was eligible to receive certain honours and privileges from the crown (Carneiro 1988, cap. 2; Lahon 2001, 516-520).

At least up to the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of the Portuguese empire was based on a corporativist conception of society and power. Society was considered an integrated organism, with a natural order and hierarchy created by divine will. The king, as the head of this body, was responsible for distributing favours according to the functions and privileges of each of its members, thereby exercising justice in the name of God. According to Xavier and Hespanha (1993, 130), ‘from a social point of view, corporativism contributes to the image of a strictly hierarchical society, because in a naturally ordered society, the irreducibility of social functions leads to the irreducibility of legal and institutional statutes’.  In historical reality, the continuous expansion of Portuguese society in the colonial period tended to create a myriad of subdivisions and classifications within the traditional representation of the three medieval orders (clergy, nobility and the common people), by expanding the nobility and its privileges, redefining functions, and subdividing the common people into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ states (the latter included the ofícios mecânicos, or manual trades).

This ongoing transformation was not limited to territory in Europe, but had ramifications throughout a vast empire, which expanded in the name of spreading the Catholic faith. In this process of contact with other peoples, legal concepts were developed to deal with the new groups who converted to Catholicism and thus integrated into the body of the empire. Since at least the fifteenth century, in addition to restrictions on those who practiced the ‘manual trades’, the concept of cleanliness of blood determined differentiations among the common people and limited the expansion of the nobility, imposing a range of restrictions on the descendants of Jews, Moors and Gypsies. The restrictions based on the ‘purity of blood statutes’, enacted later in Portugal than in Spain, date back to the Ordenações Afonsinas of 1446-7 (Carneiro 1988, chap. 2; Lahon 2001, 516-520)…

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