Marc Ferrez/Moreira Salles Institute Archive

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/12/244563532/photos-reveal-harsh-detail-of-brazils-history-with-slavery?t=1637227150929 [Accessed: 18 Novemer 2021]

Seminar Questions:

Who abolished slavery? Should the abolitionist movement and the legislation established be seen as a pre-cursor to international human rights legislation? Should the abolitionist movement have a place in the history of Human Rights? How should that history be written (e.g. which protagonists and social actors should be considered)? How has research on abolition changed?

Core Readings:

Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights, Verso, 2013,255-277. (Chapter 10)

and

Celso Castilho and Camillia Cowling, "Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review, 47:1 (Spring 2010): 89-120.

or

Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (North Carolina, 2006), Introduction + Chapter 1 ‘Insurrection and the Language of Rights’, 1-30. (See chapter scan) 

Seminar Activity:

What does this article tell us about the importance of the archive?

https://notevenpast.org/the-quilombo-activists-archive-and-post-custodial-preservation-part-ii/

Further Reading:

Yesenia Barragan. Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

David Dean (ed.) A Companion to Public History. John Wiley, 2018. Chapters 19 and 28.

Mariza de Carvalho Soares. "African Barbeiros in Brazilian Slave Ports". In Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Celso Castilho. Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Camillia Cowling, "As a Slave Woman and as a Mother: Women and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro," Caribbean special issue (ed. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara), Social History, 26:3 (August 2011), 294-311

Camillia Cowling, "Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in Rio de Janeiro," Gender & History, 22:2 (August 2010): 284-301 

Celso Castilho and Camillia Cowling, "Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review, 47:1 (Spring 2010): 89-120.

Sara Fanning. Caribbean Crossing: African Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement, New York, USA: New York University Press, 2015.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.. Black in Latin America. New York: New York University Press, 2011. (Chapters on Haiti and the Dominican Republic.) 

Richard Gray ‘The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Lourenço da Silva, the Capuchins and the Decisions of the Holy Office’, Past and Present, 1987: 115, 52-68.

Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. Cambridge, 2010.

João José Reis. "African Nations in Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia`". In Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Jeffrey D. Needell. The Sacred Cause. The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. (Introduction) 

Rebecca J. Scott. “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil and Louisiana after Emancipation.” American Historical Review, 99:1 (February 1994): 70-102.

John. K. Thornton. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.

Camilla Townsend, “Half of my Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved: The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era,” Colonial Latin American Review, 7:1 (1998): 105-28.

April Mayes, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race and Dominican National Identity. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014.

Primary Sources and Databases:

The Free Womb Project

 

Background Reading: 

Andrew Dawson,Latin America since Independence: A History with Primary Sources, 2011. (Chapters 2 and 3)

Oxford Handbook, "Slavery in Brazil".

 

Practical Written Assignment:

 

1. Choose the film that interests you the most.

Watch this episode of Henry Louis Gates Jr's Black in Latin America: Haiti and the Dominican Republic PBS, 2011.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Is a Harvard Professor, Journalist and Filmmaker. This is part of a series of PBS documentaries. We have an e-book in the library which is on the reading list below. How effective is this documentary as a piece of public History?

See also: Practical Written Assignment on Dominican Race History

https://myportfolio.warwick.ac.uk/view/view.php?t=2Ci3OMwWoDYgntyrUzK0 

There is also a review of the Haiti and the Dominican Republic episode of Black in Latin Ameirca, PBS, 2011 on the Moodle Page.

Watch the film, A Present Past: Afro-Brazilian Memories in Rio de Janeiro, 2011, developed at the Oral History and Image Lab of Federal Fluminense University.

Chapter 28 of David Dean (ed.) A Companion to Public History. John Wiley, 2018. is about this project.

How effective is this documentary as a piece of public History?

 

2. Read the blog by José Lingna Nafafé, ‘Lourenço da Silva Mendonça: The First Anti-Slavery Activist?’

You can also listen to his presentation in the Warwick History Seminar series here.

 

How effective is the blog as a piece of public history?