WR150 - SHADOW VOICES: FIGURES OF SLAVE DIFFERENCE AND RESISTANCE IN THE TEXT (HC)

Brazil was the American society that received the largest contingent of African slaves in the Americas and the longest lasting slave regime in the Western Hemisphere. This is the first complete modern survey of the institution of slavery in Brazil and how it affected the lives of enslaved Africans. It is based on major new research on the institution of slavery and the role of Africans and their descendants in Brazil. Although Brazilians have incorporated many of the North American debates about slavery, they have also developed a new set of questions about slave holding: the nature of marriage, family, religion, and culture among the slaves and free colored; the process of manumission; and the rise of the free colored class during slavery. It is the aim of this book to introduce the reader to this latest research, both to elucidate the Brazilian experience and to provide a basis for comparisons with all other American slave systems.

For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.

Slavery and Identity narrates a peculiar sort of history of the "peculiar institution." Not about slavery per se, it looks at urban slavery in an Atlantic port city from the vantage point of enslaved Africans and their descendants, examining their self-perceptions and self-identities in a variety of situations. Using both primary archival and printed sources, Mieko Nishida examines the perspectives of slaves, ex-slaves, and free-born people of color and the critical factors that affected their lives and self-perceptions. The book offers a new window on slave life in nineteenth-century Salvador, Brazil, and illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about New World slave societies." "In Salvador, slaves owned slaves and even participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Africans who were removed from Africa as slaves sometimes managed to purchase their freedom. Former slaves of African birth sharply distinguished themselves from their enslaved counterparts, though even in the fluid stratification of Salvador, African-born people found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder. Yet somehow they were never entirely excluded from society or even from power at a certain level. Brazilian-born people of African descent created their own identities in relation to the larger society's favorable treatment of Brazilian-born over African-born, of lighter-skinned over darker-skinned, and of women over men. A group of skilled free-born men of African descent were able to create a mutual aid association that enabled them to choose to identify themselves as blacks, while excluding women and other blacks of lesser means.

To studies of Brazilian slavery, this book adds a new dimension by showing how it developed in a region where mining was the chief commercial activity and how important a role gender played in this frontier setting in creating opportunities for slaves to achieve some measure of autonomy, compared with slaves who worked in sugar-cane and coffee-growing areas. The interactions among masters, slaves, and royal officials were profoundly shaped by the accessibility and widespread dispersal of gold deposits, the emergence of small urban centers in which commercial activities thrived, the sexual division of labor among slaves working in mining and commerce, and the changing sex ratio within the population of free white colonists settling in the region. Focusing attention on the changing status, autonomy, and influence of non-White women, the author argues, is one of the most effective ways of understanding the economic, demographic, and cultural evolution of the slave society as a whole.