Search

The author details an assignment she gave to her history students wherein they will write a biography of an enslaved person living in the early modern Atlantic world. Topics include the author's pedagogical goals for this "Contextualized Biography" assignment such as an analysis of an enslaved person's experiences through primary and secondary sources, and the sources used to reflect on the pedagogical and historiographical value of this assignment such as runaway advertisements.

La esclavitud fue practicada por los distintos pueblos que ocuparon la Península desde la antigüedad, pero la existencia de población traída de África y vendida en los distintos pueblos extremeños próximos a la frontera portuguesa, es un hecho que se ha investigado más recientemente. A pesar de estas valiosas investigaciones y otras sobre la esclavitud en España, se han llevado a cabo pocas iniciativas a nivel institucional, para recuperar la memoria histórica y el patrimonio material e inmaterial que pueda quedar relacionado con la esclavitud. El objetivo de este trabajo es, identificar ese patrimonio y contribuir a crear una ruta de la esclavitud en Extremadura. Para ello, se ha utilizado una metodología cualitativa basada en la revisión de fuentes secundarias, teniendo en cuenta las poblaciones extremeñas donde hubo más esclavos en los siglos XVI y XVII. El resultado es una propuesta de ruta turístico-cultural, que puede contribuir a la puesta en valor del patrimonio relacionado con estos hechos y a promover el turismo cultural en la región. Slavery was practiced by the different towns that occupied the Peninsula since antiquity, but the existence of population brought from Africa and sold in the different towns of Extremadura close to the Portuguese border, is a fact that has been investigated more recently. Despite these valuable investigations and others on slavery in Spain, few initiatives have been carried out at an institutional level to recover historical memory and tangible and intangible heritage that may be related to slavery. The objective of this work is to identify this heritage and contribute to creating a slavery route in Extremadura. For this, a qualitative methodology based on the review of secondary sources has been used, taking into account the populations of Extremadura where there were more slaves in the 16th and 17th centuries. The result is a proposal for a tourist-cultural route that can contribute to enhancing the heritage related to these events and promoting cultural tourism in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slavenregisters or slave registers of Suriname offer a unique perspective on the social and demographic history of a people in bondage. Thanks to a citizen science project, the archival sources were transcribed in 2017 by hundreds of volunteers. The transcriptions were used to create a longitudinal database of more than 90,000 enslaved persons. This paper describes the sources, data entry, and cleaning to create a standardized database as well as the matching needed to construct life courses. We discuss the best practices we have learned along the way. Finally, it offers prospects for research and expansion of the database to other population sources and areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late January 1881, a group of anti-slavery raftsmen blockaded the port of Fortaleza to slave traders declaring that enslaved persons would no longer be shipped to Brazil's southern plantations out of Ceará's northeastern harbor. The blockade was a decisive moment in the rising abolitionist movement in Brazil and culminated in slavery's abolition in Ceará in 1884, four years before the national prohibition of the institution. Traditional narratives on slavery's abolition in Ceará emphasize the development of a middle-class led, radical abolitionist movement in the province while lionizing the role played by Francisco José do Nascimento, a free man of color, in leading the raftsmen's charge against human trafficking. Recent research on the raftsmen's blockade highlights the role played by the formerly enslaved man José Luiz Napoleão in the anti-slavery strike. This article revisits the 1881 anti-slavery strike and places it in the context of maritime marronage in nineteenth century Brazil. By probing the long tradition of fugitive slaves using their access to the sea and their skills as sailors and boatmen to escape slavery and relocate from one province to another, this article demonstrates that the world of maritime labor provided opportunities and challenges for slave resistance, and fugitive mariners created a culture of contesting the geography of slavery in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency activated through exchanges with saints is not simply present or absent. Rather it is emergent, depending on the mode of saints' material and social configurations, and the mood evoked by a specific saint's manifestation. In this essay I consider the history of an Afro-Brazilian saint called Slave Anastácia, as she signifies with varying social effects for different groups of ethno-racial users. I consider how saints become manifest in a given mode, and reduce a particular mood. Mood is inseparable from intangible entities' "presence." In this essay, I leverage such radical disjunctures between the forms of presence generated by the same saint - Anastácia as suffering martyr, as serene helpmeet, as erotic object - to reconsider how saints work at the intersection of mode and mood. By paying attention to saints and mood, I seek to worry over-familiar terms like will and agency. Thinking through mood points us toward material conjunctures and emotional resonances whose agency is diffuse but nevertheless generates predispositions to act in certain ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The play A lata de lixo da história was written in the late 1960s, a moment of great importance in Brazilian social life as of its author, Roberto Schwarz. Its production context was, from a national point of view, one of repressive intensification of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship and, from Schwarz's personal point of view, of sedimentation of a very significant critical turn in his work. In this sense, we aim to analyze the play looking at it articulately with the transformations the country was going through and a sedimentation of an end-feeling to the idea of national formation to the young Roberto Schwarz. At the heart of our analysis is the notion of dialectic, so central to Schwarz's materialist point of view. Despite the various studies that have been done about his work, little has been discussed about the way in which dialectics operates in his work, except in a celebratory way. I am referring, above all, to the way in which the class struggle in its Brazilian sense is portrayed by the critic, taking into account his view on the practically absolute margin of will of the Brazilian elites and a somewhat static notion of slave relationships. The play was chosen precisely because it crystallizes a coexistence of contradictory temporalities that reveals a certain generational sense with what the military's rise to power in 1964 meant, as well as it elucidates contradictory aspects of Schwarzian production that have been little commented on in his critical fortune. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical reading of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. By drawing on early modern race studies and Marshall Sahlin's notion of 'mutuality of being', the article discusses Morrison's lyrical prose as well as Traoré's songs and performance to show how they merge and amplify one another in Sellars' meditative staging to jointly rearticulate early modern notions of race, kinship and family embedded in Othello. By questioning what lies dormant, unseen and unheard in the Shakespearean tragedy, Desdemona supplements it with what Imtiaz Habib has termed 'imprints of the invisible' and invites its readers and audiences to ponder the onset of European colonialism, the slave trade, colour-based racism and their global aftermath, positing theatre as a metaphor for other civic, shared spaces where honest conversations about race, gender and class inequalities can open up a path to healing and reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the enslavement of free people was criminalized and tried in Brazil throughout the nineteenth century. Based on court cases from the southern province of Rio Grande do Sul pertaining to “reducing free persons to slavery,” we analyzed, in a preliminary way, the application of article 179 of the Brazilian Criminal Code of 1830. We draw attention to the profiles of the victims, the context in which the cases occurred, and the decisions taken. The cases have been divided into three groups, according to the circumstances of enslavement: the first concerns Africans brought to Brazil illegally, after the Atlantic slave trade was banned, as well as their descendants; the second comprises freedpersons whose manumissions were ignored for different reasons; and the third group is composed of free or freed blacks, who were kidnapped and sold as slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article an attempt is made to use burial records to describe some basic characteristics of the slave population of Curitiba, studying also the economic activities to which the slaves’ work was directed. Two distinct situations were detected: a boom occurred during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and it was followed by a long stagnation beginning in the 1800s. Burial records also show that sex imbalances were relatively frequent in local slave population, that slave families became less visible and important along the century studied, and that slave holdings declined consistently in size and relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the wide range of terms used by the ancient Greeks to refer to the slave, for decades the Hellenists will interpret this lack of precision as a characteristic of the untidy Greek conception of slavery, making it directly difficult for the same scholars to examine. modern. With the work of Detlef Lotze (1930-2018) in the middle of the last century, however, this plurality of concepts around the slave begins to be interpreted as an indication of the complexity with which slavery is conceived and applied in the Greek world, the which, finally, would consist of heterogeneous forms of subjection and not a universally defined and exercised institution. The concepts «slavery-dependence» and «slaverymerchandise », thus, acquire relevance to identify the necessary difference between a form of slavery where the slave manages the production process, and another where he participates only as a material element of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comes from a mapping elaborated on mozambican authors (2016-2017), in the scope of post-doctoral studies. This research resulted in the book "Cartografias under construction - Some female writers from Mozambique" (EDUFRB, 2019). The book "The Singing of the Slaves" (Nandyala, 2018), by Paulina Chiziane, from the Mozambican storyteller, stands out in this text. Its discursive focus agendas understandings about memorial ballads and the recurrence of the sea as an environment of memories invented by voices and cries present in the work. The purpose of this text is to present some descriptive-interpretative readings of the "texts in verses", as the author characterizes the narratives, with an emphasis on understanding odes as inventions of memories of what one wants to remember, but also forgotten, related to the slavery of africans in the Americas. It is expected, with this text, to encourage the reading of "The Singing of the Slaves" and the understanding that remembering, similar to "texts in verses", can mean a process of immersion in the past, implying forgetting and/or revoking memories and inventing the present time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jesuits arrived in New Spain in the 1570s and soon became participants in a dynamic world of silver capitalism at the center of the early modern global economy. They launched money-making enterprises to sustain their missions, churches, and schools (colegios) that relied upon enslaved African producers alongside indigenous workers in complex labor arrangements. The diversity of labor at the Jesuit-run Santa Lucía and Xochimancas estates contrast with the heavier reliance on enslaved African labor at Jesuit sugar plantations in Brazil. The article analyzes a key eighteenth-century Jesuit text, the Instrucciones a los hermanos jesuitas administradores de haciendas , to show how the Jesuits in New Spain conceived of their management of enslaved people and negotiated the contradictions between the spiritual and secular challenges of the boom era of silver capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name Antoine Lavalette (1708–67) is infamous within the Society of Jesus. The superior of the Martinique mission in the mid-eighteenth century, he is known for triggering the 1764 expulsion from France. Less known is his torture to death of four enslaved men and women. The visitor sent to investigate Lavalette's commercial activities, Jean-François de la Marche (1700–62), discovered these murders and reported them to Rome. This paper analyzes La Marche's account of the atrocities within their Caribbean context. It demonstrates that Lavalette's killings were within the established norms of the planter class. It further argues that his actions were part of the Society's attempts to reconcile its religious calling with the gruesome realities of plantation slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bronwen Everill, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. Abolitionists had to first convince buyers in Africa (mostly Liberia and Serra Leone) that slaves were no longer an acceptable commodity with which they can pay for desired goods. [Extracted from the article]

The present paper is divided into three large steps around the themes of spirit possession and the historical imagination of slavery in Cuba. These three steps reflect both ethnographic dimensions of these themes and broader theoretical approaches towards them. The last step, 'apomimesis', is the one proposed by the author, not by way of replacement but displacement. The first step, 'formulaic' historical imagination, covers the ground of a direct expression of slavery as historical trauma through spirit possession. The second step, 'mimesis', displaces the first by adding into it the possibility of reversal, of empowerment, the slave becoming an anti-slave. The third creates another simultaneous condition. Through the negative dialectics of apomimesis the non-slave emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the loyalty of slaves to the Union during the American Civil War going beyond two usual statements, either "Lincoln freed the slaves" or "the slaves were freed." In doing so, it discusses how the abolition of slavery was a result of the interaction of two powerful actors, the Republican Party and its leader the US president and the slaves themselves, who claimed to be free by migrating to the Union lines. In a dialogue with E. P. Thompson, the article draws attention to the significance to plebeians and workers of the exclusion of institutional politics and the importance of political history also for black Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question as to whether the author of Jeremiah 34:8-22 was a voice for the manumitted Judean debt slaves, who were forced back into slavery during a temporary lifting of the siege of Jerusalem during 589-588 B.C.E. Jeremiah 34:8-22 sets the re-enslavement of these slaves as a precedent that explained the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. The allusion in Jeremiah 34:14 to Deuteronomy 15:1, 12 does, however, signify that Jeremiah 34:8-22 echoes the "brother ethics" present in Deuteronomy 15:1-18. The author of Jeremiah 34:8-22 shared the "humanitarian" concerns of the debt release and the slave release laws in Deuteronomy 15:1-18. The debt slaves should have been treated as brothers and not as mere objects. He thus became a voice for these marginalised Judeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the topic of the right of reparation in the light of the second edition of De instauranda Aethiopum salute (1647) by Alonso de Sandoval S.J. (1576/1577-1652). The central argument that we maintain is that Sandoval could be a critic of American slavery with regard to an unfair application of the slavery titles. If the application of slavery titles is subject to doubt, slavery is illegal and reparation, therefore, necessary and just. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Penelope Aubin's popular novel The Noble Slaves (1722) alongside Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), particularly her letter "To the Countesse of --" (May 1718), which depicts the enslavement of a Spanish "Lady." By contrasting these two authors, I show the difficulty that feminist thinkers had in forging an Enlightenment appreciation for the Islamic world and a critique of Islamic slave institutions at the same time. The ways in which Aubin and Montagu deploy proand anti-Islamic sentiments in combination with varying levels of attention to the psycho-sexual trauma of female enslavement in the Ottoman world is emblematic of larger trends in the period. An understanding of this dynamic can help us to think more clearly about how we have inherited these tensions in our own scholarly work on feminism, slavery, and the English encounter with the Ottoman world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With few exceptions, many of the Church Fathers approved, in principle, of the punishment of slaves. However, there were very specific guidelines on why, how, and when to punish slaves. The purpose of this article is to analyse more closely how some of the early Church Fathers conceptualised the punishment of slaves. The study begins, first, by examining the theological justifications for the punishment of slaves. Secondly, it assesses the reasons for punishment - for what reasons did these Church Fathers admonish their slaveholding audiences to punish their slaves? Thirdly, the author investigates some selected Church Fathers' advice on how to punish, in terms of both the psychological disposition of the owner and the various methods for punishment directed towards the slave body. Finally, the article more specifically explores how these Church Fathers understood some of the main elements that were present in, during, and after punishment, namely fear and pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The parable of the loyal and wise slave appears in Q 12:42-46 (Matt. 24:45-51; Luke 12:42-46). I have argued elsewhere that verses 45-46 were added to verses 42-44 by Q's main redactor. If so, only Q 12:42-44 originally appeared in Kloppenborg's formative stratum, or Q1. The purpose of the present article is to ascertain the parable's meaning as it seemingly appeared on the level of Q's formative stratum. The latter is mainly achieved by taking seriously the parable's application of the slavery metaphor. It should not come as a surprise that the parable in Q 12:42-44 is all about feeding God's people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery. By using James C. Scott's concepts of 'Hidden' and 'Public Transcripts', the article examines primary sources produced precisely by those merchants and planters, sources that were meant to be kept between them. Thus, the article offers a window into their world and a good tool to understand their reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a sequence of studies on slavery in Brazil in 50 years, we have the original study on the political dimension of this slavery from original documentation (Annals and Archives) carried forward by Tamis Parron. In the nineteenth century occurred, according to the author, a politicization of slaveholding issues rather than the development of a policy of slavery. The smuggling of slaves and the defense of slavery are too significant to be set aside by historiography events. To Parron, external aspects such as change in American policy slavery and the position of England clearly interfered in the internal politics of Brazil. However, to the author, what existed was not only the defense of slavery with the clear involvement of the state, but also political game scenes by those who had different opinions. Some indirect events such as the Land Law and the domestic slave trade were part of a politicization of the issue of slavery and consequently, the maintenance of the slave society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]