Abolition and Rights

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) 

Lingna Nafafé, José. Lourenco da Silva Mendoza and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

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?