Papers by ROBERT W . SLENES
Afro-Ásia, Jun 1, 2014
Atlântico como rio: o símile, do historiador Alberto da Costa e Silva, ressalta o quanto o oceano... more Atlântico como rio: o símile, do historiador Alberto da Costa e Silva, ressalta o quanto o oceano uniu a África e o Brasil, facilitando sua comunicação na época moderna. 1 Em Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World, Roquinaldo Amaral Ferreira, professor da Brown University, EUA, aprofunda o tema. O enfoque é no intercâmbio entre Angola e Brasil, mais especificamente nas trocas culturais efetivadas, na margem angolana do "rio", entre africanos, portugueses e brasileiros durante o período-auge do comércio de escravos (c. 1680-1850). O livro é a primeira monografia publicada de Ferreira, mas o terceiro trabalho de fôlego dele sobre as ligações entre Angola e o mundo luso--brasileiro no período escravista. O atual estudo vai na esteira de suas te-ses de mestrado e doutorado. 2 Como os trabalhos anteriores, o novo texto impressiona, tanto pela densidade da pesquisa em arquivos variadosangolanos, portugueses e brasileiros -, quanto pela inovação metodológica e temática. Faz jus ao padrão de excelência da prestigiosa série da qual faz parte, a "African Studies" (iniciada em 1968) da Editora da Universidade de Cambridge. Com ele, e com suas duas teses inéditas, o brasileiro Ferreira se projeta para o primeiro time internacional de historiadores da África. Como indica no título da obra, Ferreira dialoga com o conceito de 1
Estudos Econômicos, 1987
This work analyses the 1801 manuscript censuses of four of the eight Companhias de Ordenangas of ... more This work analyses the 1801 manuscript censuses of four of the eight Companhias de Ordenangas of Lorena. The, main characteristics of the slave population are studied (marital status, age, sex etc), which shows that 53% of all slaves had family ties. The analyses of slave family structures shows that the "regular" families were predominant and concentrated in the estates with greater number of slaves. Other aspects studied are: the legitimacy of the children under 14 and the condition of the mothers (married, widowed or single), by origin, colour and age groups.Analisam-se as listas nominativas de quatro das oito Companhias de Ordenanças de Lorena, em 1801. Estudam-se as características básicas dos escravos (estado conjugal, idade, sexo etc), destacando-se a existência de relações familiares entre 53% da massa escrava. Analisando-se a estrutura destas famílias, indica-se a predominância das "regularmente" constituídas, com uma maior concentração nos grandes plantéis. Estudam-se também a legitimidade das crianças com 14 ou menos anos e a condição das mães (casadas, viuvas ou solteiras), segundo a origem e a cor e por faixas etárias
África, margens e oceanos: perspectivas de história social
The Chattel Principle, 2017
In April, 1848, a plan for slave rebellion, centered on the county of Vassouras in the Paraíba Va... more In April, 1848, a plan for slave rebellion, centered on the county of Vassouras in the Paraíba Valley, Rio de Janeiro’s coffee hinterland, was discovered and quelled. The sources on the conspiracy reveal that it was linked to a religious movement similar to the community “cults of affliction ” for healing social ills documented in the old Kingdom of Kongo, a major source of slaves for Brazil’s Southeast (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo). They also suggest that it had a considerable impact later that year on debates in the Brazilian Parliament over the future of the Atlantic slave trade, which still flourished, although illegal since 1831. In short, the definitive abolition of this commerce by the Brazilian Parliament in 1850 – almost obtained in 1848 – may have reflected internal pressure by the slaves themselves, predicated on African values, not just the threat of British intervention.1 Lending credence to this interpretation is the existence of similar ...
Crossroads of Freedom
This book is at the crossroads of vari ous paths in recent historiography. 1 Walter Fraga followe... more This book is at the crossroads of vari ous paths in recent historiography. 1 Walter Fraga followed the trails of experience and self-reflection blazed by slaves, freed people, and masters, to understand conflicts and alliances in the Bahian Recôncavo (the bay on which Salvador is located, and its immediate agricultural hinterland) from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In so doing, he abolished the radical dissociation between "slavery" and "freedom" which had led many scholars to see the end of bondage in 1888 as either the terminus of one historical road (and research agenda) or the beginning of another; for it became clear that strategies, customs, and identities were worked out before emancipation shaped subsequent tensions between subalterns and their superiors. Indeed, the focus on actual lives, lived and pondered, as a way to discover broader social logics, brought Professor Fraga to the path of microhistory, an approach that seeks "God" (evidence of larger pro cesses of change and continuity) in the intricacy of "detail. " 2 This option, in turn, took him to people's names-that is, to the method of nominative rec ord linkage-as a strategy for tracking persons over time in order to trace individual and collective biographies. Crossroads of Freedom: Slaves and Freed People in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1910 is the point of encounter of these diverse but converging paths. To say this, however, only weakly defines the book's qualities. The crossroads in this case are exceptionally charged with power-so much so that it is difficult to do justice to Fraga's method in a brief compass. How does one explain, for instance, the magic of chapter 2, in which the author employs detailed police documents and an exceptionally rich trial rec ord to reconstruct the assassination, by slaves, of a priest-administrator on a sugar plantation of the Carmelite Order in 1882? Fraga analyzes and contextualizes the case so skillfully that it illuminates slave owners' theater of dominion and
Elsewhere, I argued that malungu, “great canoe” in kikongo and kimbundu – taken into Portuguese a... more Elsewhere, I argued that malungu, “great canoe” in kikongo and kimbundu – taken into Portuguese as malungo, “companion of the same slave ship” – was emblematic of the cultural exchanges between Central Africans of different origins in Brazil, indeed throughout the Americas. From malungu, Atlantic-Zone Central Africans discovered they shared the concept of kalunga, “large body of water, death, the otherworld,” and took the first steps (often completed under the plantation experience) towards forming a common identity, more “African” in impulse than “Creole.” I revisit the question here, proceeding from kikongo dictionaries to sources on kongo community cults of affliction/fruition, bantu root words and common myths of origin among many western Central-African peoples. I identify other “–lungu words” of different tonalities in kikongo, signifying “suffering,” “death,” but also “fulfillment.” I also document widespread stories about the migration of ancestors under duress, travelling in large canoes, each vessel bearing the founding mother of a matrilineage. Given that malungos and “sippi/carabelas/batiments” (“shipmates” in the Afro-Caribbean) considered themselves kinfolk, these findings suggest that the metonymic meaning of malungu evoked far more than a shared crossing of kalunga. It resonated with Central-African archetypes for death and rebirth, for overcoming calamity and founding new societies.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Inspired by research in anthropology and cognitive science that places analogical thinking at the... more Inspired by research in anthropology and cognitive science that places analogical thinking at the center of human culture and cognition, this chapter focuses on the metaphors by which western Central Africans, particularly speakers of Kikongo, understood—and withstood—the horrors of the Middle Passage and New World enslavement. Canoe metaphors figured prominently in West Central Africa. So too did tropes making ontological connections between things designated by phonetic (near-) homonyms. Both types of analogies helped people explain their lineage origins (locating them in past migrations under duress), find cures for social ills, seal marriages and other alliances, and open liminal paths from suffering to plenitude in this world and in the afterlife. Based primarily on the author’s research in dictionaries of African languages, particularly Kikongo, and on Central African cults of affliction-fruition in Brazil’s 19th-century Southeast, the essay argues that strong shipmate bonding...
Hispanic American Historical Review
Almanack
This essay dialogs with David Eltis’s article in this issue of Almanack and highlights Eltis’s co... more This essay dialogs with David Eltis’s article in this issue of Almanack and highlights Eltis’s contributions to Brazilian studies of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It focuses on the historical relationship between “capitalism” and “slavery”, particularly the “second slavery” of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on changing Anglo-American and Luso-Brazilian “political economies”. Like Eltis’s article, it is especially concerned with the synergy, or lack thereof, between “external” and “internal” factors in determining regional and national economic growth. In the spirit of the forum at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in which Eltis’s article was originally presented and debated, this essay emphasizes a historiographical approach particularly aimed at undergraduate and graduate students in History, the main audience at the original seminar.
Historia Social, 2010
Resumo Desde aproximadamente os anos 1960, desmoronou-se boa parte do mundo que as ciências human... more Resumo Desde aproximadamente os anos 1960, desmoronou-se boa parte do mundo que as ciências humanas haviam construído. Mais precisamente, houve um profundo "descentramento" (decentering) desse mundo na academia-isto é, uma mudança dos paradigmas que guiam a pesquisa. Quero refletir sobre essa mudança, enfocando particularmente os estudos africanistas. Pretendo abordar meu tema com ênfase na disciplina de história e a partir de três perspectivas. Primeiro, delineio o perfil geral da mudança de paradigmas para propor uma atualização urgente na estrutura curricular das ciências sociais brasileiras. Segundo, discuto trajetórias intelectuais e mudanças institucionais dentro da academia do "centro" como exemplo cabal do descentramento-ou subversão-causado pela "vivência com a periferia": isto é, pela intensa experiência de pesquisa de campo de estudiosos do Atlântico-norte fora de sua região, e a progressiva incorporação de intelectuais dos países do "Sul" como seus interlocutores. Terceiro, enfoco os estudos afro-brasileiros para sugerir a necessidade de um deslocamento semelhante, operado a partir das "margens" da sociedade brasileira.
Portuguese Studies, Mar 22, 2006
... On Rugendas in Brazil see especially: Newton Carneiro, Rugendas no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ko... more ... On Rugendas in Brazil see especially: Newton Carneiro, Rugendas no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Kosmos, 1979); Pablo Diener and Maria de Fátima Costa, Rugendas eo Brasil (Säo Paulo: Capivara, 2002). ... 126-46. 11 Ana Maria Belluzzo, 'A Propósito d'O Brasil dos Viajantes1, ...
Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, 2006
New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico, 2012
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Brazil. Brazil p... more This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Brazil. Brazil possessed a more varied slave economy with a much larger sector producing for the internal market than scholars had previously thought. The already large slave population of Minas Gerais increased dramatically from 168,543 in 1819 to 381,893 in 1872. Minas Gerais consisted of an intricate mercantile system based on slave labour that not only supplied foreign markets with hides, tobacco, and the products of a revived mining and incipient coffee sector, but also satisfied the domestic demand of Minas and of the rapidly growing Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo plantation complex for cheese, hogs, cattle, and homespun cotton cloth. An elite group of merchants in the ports — often descendants of representatives of Portuguese mercantile houses who had married into large landowning and slaveholding families — came to dominate Brazil's trade with Africa as well as its coastal commerce.
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Papers by ROBERT W . SLENES