by Marília B.A. Ariza, Maria Helena P.T. Machado, and Cassia Roth
This special issue brings Brazil squarely into the centre of the recent trend on gender, slavery, and capitalism in the global history of slavery. The articles here – from scholars working in American, Brazilian, and European universities at all career stages – are specifically dedicated to the study of Brazilian slavery and gender. The articles emphasize different aspects of enslaved women’s lives in Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Topics range from pregnancy, breastfeeding, child rearing, and other reproductive experiences to varied labour regimes including both field and domestic labour, to enslaved people’s use of the judicial system and their fights for freedom. The articles also bring the topic of indigenous slavery in its varied forms in frontier areas during the colonial and imperial periods into dialogue with histories of African slavery. Together, they demonstrate how Brazilian historiography is evolving in its consideration of the importance of gender in defining slavery and illuminating the history of the most persistent and varied system of slavery in the Americas.
Table of Contents
Part I: Enslaved Reproduction in Legislation, Custom, and Practice
Cassia Roth, Rethinking Borders and Birth: Free Womb and Free Soil in Portugal and Brazil
Daniele Weigert, Between Civilization and Slavery: Dispossession and Racial Mixing in Brazilian Nation Formation
Maria Helena P. T. Machado & Antonio Alexandre Isidio Cardoso, A Freedwoman and Her Enslaved Children: Terror, Motherhood, and Death in Northern Brazil amid Slavery’s Decline
Part II: Health, Body and Gender in Slavery
Tânia Salgado Pimenta & Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Diseases, African Women and Atlantic Demography in Rio de Janeiro, c. 1830–1855
Lorena Telles, Childbirth in the Slave Quarters: Midwives, Doctors and Afro-Descendant Culture in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Brazil
Caroline Passarini Sousa, Slavery and Reproduction: Enslaved Women in Medical and Plantation Manuals in Brazil and Cuba
Part III: Motherhood and Slavery: From Frontiers to Plantations
Izabel Barros, Beyond the Ledger: The Story of Enslaved Women on a Swiss-Owned Plantation in Nineteenth-Century Ilhéus
Mariana Muaze, The Private Sphere of Domination: Gender Relations, Domestic Slavery, and Violence in Paraíba Valley during the Nineteenth Century
Part IV: Gendering Freedom
Karoline Carula, The Maternal Experiences of Enslaved and Freed Women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1880-c.1888
Luciana da Cruz Crito, Sabina da Cruz: Fabulations About the Life of the Woman Who Denounced the Malê Uprising
Marília B.A. Ariza, On Being a Freedwoman: Gender Relations, Gendered Violence and a Woman’s Perspective in Southeastern Brazil During the 1880s
Cassia Roth