Abolition of Slavery in Brazil
Seminar Questions
- What main reasons have historians given for the abolition of slavery in Brazil?
- What was the role of gradual legal emancipation; the Paraguayan War; ideas about backwardness/ 'progress'?
- How has the historiography changed over about the last 3 decades?
- Where were the centres of the abolition movement?
- What role did enslaved people/ free Afro-Brazilians/ women play?
- Was abolitionism similar or different to other Atlantic abolitionist movements?
- How much changed in 1888?
Readings
For a general overview, have a look over Thomas Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, chapter 4, "Making Brazil 'Modern': 1870-1910"
Then choose at least ONE of:
- Barbara Weinstein, "The Decline of the Progressive Planter and the Rise of Subaltern Agency: Shifting Narratives of Slave Emancipation in Brazil" in Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North, eds. Gilbert Joseph, Emily S Rosenberg, Emilia Viotti da Costa, and Steve Stern, Duke University Press 2001 [useful historiographical overview]
- Drescher, Seymour. “Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 68:3 (August 1988): 429-60 [useful on transnational comparisons and connections]
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Walter Fraga Filho, Crossroads of Freedom: Slaves and Freed People in Brazil 1870-1910 "Introduction" [useful on microhistory, enslaved agency, post-emancipation]
- Cowling, Camillia. “Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro.” Gender & History, 22:2 (August 2010): 284-301 [useful on gender, enslaved agency and its connections to wider abolition campaigns]
Further reading
Robert Edgar Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888 (1972) [multiple copies in library; one is on short loan] (older, but recommended for a fuller narrative account of abolition)
Chapter 6: “The Emancipation of the Newborn”
Chapter 12: “The Abolitionist Movement: Second Phase”
Chapter 16: “The Conversion of São Paulo”
Celso Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Citizenship
Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into white: race and nationality in Brazilian thought(1993)
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- Chapter 1: “The Intellectual Context of Abolition in Brazil,” pp 1-37
Angela Alonso, The Last Abolition: The Brazilian Anti-Slavery Movement, 1868-1888 CUP 2021
Celso Castilho and Camillia Cowling, Funding Freedom, Popularising Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review, 47:1 (2010)
Celso T. Castilho "The Racial Terms of Citizenship: Abolition and its Political Aftermath in Northeastern Brazil," in Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, edited by Whitney Nell Stewart, and John Garrison Marks, University of Georgia Press, 2018.
Camillia Cowling Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro 2013
Maria Helena Machado "From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara and and the Problem of citizenship in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil" Hispanic American Historical Review 2006
Rebecca J Scott, ed. The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil Duke University Press, 1988