Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808-1888 / Edition 1

by Mieko Nishida

Overview

Slavery and Identity narrates a peculiar sort of history of the "peculiar institution." Not about slavery per se, it looks at urban slavery in an Atlantic port city from the vantage point of enslaved Africans and their descendants, examining their self-perceptions and self-identities in a variety of situations. The book offers a new window on slave life in 19th-century Salvador, Brazil, and illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about New World slave societies. In Salvador, slaves owned slaves and even participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Africans who were removed from Africa as slaves sometimes managed to purchase their freedom, and a few entered the commerce of trade in their fellow humans. Nishida explains that though African-born people found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder, they somehow were never entirely excluded from society or even from power at a certain level.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253342096
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	04/10/2003
Series:	Blacks in the Diaspora
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mieko Nishida is Assistant Professor of History at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. She held a Predoctoral Research Fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia and a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Tables, Map, and Figures
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. A "Capital of Africa" in Brazil
Part I: To Be African-Born and Enslaved, circa 1808-1831
2. The Creation of New Identity, 1808-1831
3. The Representation of Identity, 1808-1831
Part II: To Be African-Born and Freed, circa 1808-1880
4. The Recreation of Identity, 1808-1831
5. The Convergence of Identity, 1831-1880
Part III: To Be Brazilian-Born, circa 1808-1888
6. The Creation of Disparate Identity, 1808-1851
7. The Labyrinth of Identity, 1851-1888
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

". . . an interesting contribution to the rich historiography of Salvador da Bahia, of the great cities of the African Atlantic. . . Overall, the book succeeds admirably in delving into the complex process of identity formation in Brazil."—Choice

From the Publisher

. . . an interesting contribution to the rich historiography of Salvador da Bahia, of the great cities of the African Atlantic. . . Overall, the book succeeds admirably in delving into the complex process of identity formation in Brazil.

Choice