For this week, in addition to the weekly reading, please find ONE PRIMARY SOURCE from the list on the main bibliography at the top that you are thinking of using for your source-based essay (it doesn't need to link to this week's topic). Make a note of page numbers or links so that we can look it up in groups in class. Why did you choose it? What is its value as a source? Are there other primary sources it would work well with perhaps? How are you thinking of using it in the essay?

Session powerpoint

Seminar Questions

• Why were so many women manumitted in Brazil, Cuba, and other “Iberian” slave societies? Was women’s high manumission rate limited to these societies?
• Was the pursuit of manumission “resistance”, “accommodation,” or neither?
• Was it collective or individual?
• Should it be attributed to sexual relations with owners and other powerful men?

Readings

• Proctor III, Frank “Trey.” “Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 86:2 (2006): 309-36.
• Cowling, Camillia Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (2013), "Introduction"

Further reading:

• Grinberg, Keila. “Freedom Suits and Civil Law in Brazil and the United States.” Slavery and Abolition, 22:3 (December 2001): 66-82.
• Karasch, Mary. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. Princeton University Press, 1987. [E-book at library], Chapter 11: “The Letter of Liberty,” pp 335-70
• Aisnara Perera Díaz and María de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, "The African Women of the Dos Hermanos Slave Ship in Cuba: Slaves First, Mothers Second." Women's History Review (published online June 2017, in special issue "Mothering Slaves," eds. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Machado, Diana Paton and Emily West)
• As If she were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, eds. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, Terri L Synder (CUP, 2020) (many of the essays in this volume we started reading last week contain useful perspectives on women and manumission)
• Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World 2005
• Teresa Prados Torreira The Power of her Will Alabama University Press, (on women owners as enslavers and as manumitters)
• Cowling, Camillia. “As a Slave Woman and as a Mother: Women and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro.” Social History, 26:3 (August 2011), 294-311
• Vera Kutsinski Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993 [wider context on mestizaje in national imaginary]