Authors: Mieko Nishida
ISBN-13: 9780253342096, ISBN-10: 0253342090
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Date Published: March 2003
Edition: 1st Edition
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.
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.
Acknowledgments | ||
List of Abbreviations | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | A "Capital of Africa" in Brazil | 11 |
Pt. 1 | To Be African-Born and Enslaved, Circa 1808-1831 | |
2 | The Creation of New Identity, 1808-1831 | 29 |
3 | The Representation of Identity, 1808-1831 | 48 |
Pt. 2 | To Be African-Born and Freed, Circa 1808-1880 | |
4 | The Re-creation of Identity, 1808-1831 | 73 |
5 | The Convergence of Identity, 1831-1880 | 92 |
Pt. 3 | To Be Brazilian-Born, Circa 1808-1888 | |
6 | The Creation of Disparate Identity, 1808-1851 | 123 |
7 | The Labyrinth of Identity, 1851-1888 | 142 |
Conclusion | 157 | |
Glossary | 167 | |
Notes | 169 | |
Bibliography | 227 | |
Index | 251 |