The recognition of slaves and freed persons as historic subjects has ended up influencing studies about the destiny of those who were enslaved and their descendants in former slave societies after the legal abolition of slavery. While in Brazil the 1980s represented a landmark in the historiography of slavery, we can see the 2000s as being decisive for the historiography of the forms, conditions, and concepts of liberty in the post-abolition period. The production of books and documentaries, the holding of national and international events, and the formation of research groups using the terms 'post-emancipation' and 'post-abolition' from the north to the south of the country, are evidence of a significant field of investigation, committed to reconstituting trajectories, processes, and experiences of the liberty of the black population in Brazil and in the Americas after the legal prohibition of slavery.
Due to the amplitude of the field many questions emerge. What does this signify about the post-abolition period as a historical problem? What are the meanings and limits of the legal revocation of slavery in the old slaveholding Atlantic societies? Can precise constructions be built of what this post-abolition period was? What are the meanings of the formal abolition of slavery? Are post-abolition and post-emancipation synonyms or distinct forms of looking at and researching the experiences of liberty and the legal meanings of the abolition of slavery? When did the post-abolition period start and end? What is the place of experiences of becoming free and of abolitionism in the nineteenth century? How have the politicization of the memory of slavery and the study of the present time contributed to delimit their chronological borders? In what ways does working with various concepts, sources, and methodologies question the classical thesis that blacks were 'abandoned to their own luck,' bringing to the center of the discussion debates related to the rights of citizenship, the worlds of free labor, racialization, racism, social mobility, migrations, gender relations, generations, access to land, education, and black and indigenous social relations in local, transnational, or comparative approaches?
These are some of the questions focused on by the authors of the works published in the thematic dossier "Post-Abolition in the Atlantic World," which is part of this issue of Revista Brasileira de História.
Leonardo Affonso de Miranda Pereira's work opens the dossier with "In the rhythm of Vagalume: black cultures, dance associations, and nationality in the writing of Francisco Guimarães (1904-1933)." Francisco Guimarães', or Vagalume, trajectory is used as a guidewire to dive into the universe of popular culture of the period. Miranda Pereira highlights the valorization of black agency in his columns about musical life and entertainment in Rio de Janeiro. Pereira situates the production of the popular Carioca columnist and dramatist as part of a process of dispute about Brazilian identity, among whose results were the establishment of samba as the "rhythm capable of representing nationality."
Two of the articles revisit the classic theme of black peasantry in the post-abolition period in the Southeastern and Southern regions of Brazil. In "Revisiting 'Family and Transition': Family, land, and social mobility in the post-abolition period: Rio de Janeiro (1888-1940)," Carlos Eduardo Coutinho da Costa analyzes more than six decades of civil registers in the municipality of Nova Iguaçu, identifying the economic and demographic impacts of citriculture on rural black families in the Rio de Janeiro and their strategies of social mobility. In "Mr. Citizen Manoel Inácio and the conquest of citizenship: the black peasantry of Morro Alto and the Republic that was," Rodrigo de Azevedo Weimer looks at the political agency of black peasantry on the northern coast of Rio Grande do Sul in the struggle for citizens' rights during the First Republic.
Moving the focus to Bahia, Wlamyra Albuquerque also looks at the connections between the post-abolition period and citizenship in "The political realm of Teodoro Sampaio and Rui Barbosa: strategies and alliances made by colored men in Brazil (1880-1919)." Focusing on the slave experience of the family of Teodoro Sampaio, Albuquerque demonstrates the connections, approximations, and distances between the two important Bahian political actors active at the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Republic. It thus offers the reader an innovative perspective of the context of the political actions of blacks and whites in the decades which follows Abolition.
Two other articles look at the historiographic debate about continuities and ruptures between the slave experience and the working class movement. André Cicalo, in "Fields of Post-Abolition: Labor and 'black' experience among coffee workers in Rio de Janeiro (1931-1964)," looks at this theme in relation to the port of Rio de Janeiro, making an innovative contribution in relation to the study of racialization of the occupational structure in the port. The theme of racialization reappears in "The legacy of Rosário: worker associativism and the silence of ethnic-racial identity in the post-abolition period, Laguna (SC)," by Thiago Juliano Sayão, which analyzes the hiding of race of color in Sociedade Recreativa União Operária (1903), founded by Afro-Descendants linked to the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos (Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks) in the city of Laguna, in Santa Catarina.
The comparative perspective between the experiences of the two largest nations which passed through an emancipationist process in the nineteenth century are present in two papers in our dossier: "The Dangers of White Blacks: mulatto culture, class, and eugenic beauty in the post-emancipation (USA, 1900-1920)," by Giovana Xavier da Conceição Nascimento, and "The legacy of slave songs in the United States and Brazil: musical dialogues in the post-emancipation period", by Martha Abreu. Nascimento analyzes, in texts and images published in American magazines, the emergence in the first decades of the twentieth century of a 'pigmentocracy' resulting from the intra-racial system of segregation based on skin tone. Abreu starts with the works of Du Bois and Coelho Netto to reflect on the similarities of the legacies of the canção escrava(slave song) - or 'the sound of captivity' - in the United States and Brazil.
An interview by Hebe Mattos and Martha Abreu with Eric Foner, a pioneering historian in the study of the post-emancipation period in the United States complements the thematic dossier of this edition.
This volume includes six individual papers. Two of them present new results of research about the Brazilian workers' movement between the 1960s and 1980s: "Church-State relations in a working-class town during the military dictatorship," by Alejandra Luisa Magalhães Estevez, and "A strike which endangered national security: the case of sugar and the struggle of workers for better living conditions," by Felipe Augusto dos Santos Ribeiro. The social and political actions of intellectuals, religious, and Catholic organizations constitutes the common thematic field of "Active Catholic intellectuals in Brazil in the 1930s," by Helena Isabel Mueller, and "A Ordem magazine and the 'communist scourge': on the border between the political, intellectual, and religious spheres," by Marco Antônio Machado Lima Pereira. In "'We identify with civilization, within civilization': Urban self-images in the Sertões of Bahia," Valter Gomes Santos de Oliveira analyzes memorialistic texts, journalistic reports, and photographs produced by the petty Sertanejo intellectuality in Bahia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Vitor Marcos Gregório, in "Negotiated division: the debates about Paraná province and the Imperial representative system, 1843," analyzes the relationship between the creation of new administrative units and alterations in how the country's political system functioned.
The volume concludes with three reviews. In "Labor, Environmental History, and Sugar Cane in Cuba and Brazil," originally published in English in the journal Social History, Professor Aviva Chomsky analyzes four recent books on similar themes, two of them dealing with Brazil (The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, by Thomas Rogers, and This Land Is Ours: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil, by Wendy Wolford), and another two about Cuba (Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959, by Gillian McGillivray, and From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492, by Reinaldo Funes Monzote). Finally, Walkiria Oliveira Silva presents to the reader What is History for? Johann Gustav Droysen and the functions of historiography, by Arthur Alfaix Assis, and Jean Rodrigues Sales comments on the awaited biography Luís Carlos Prestes: um revolucionário entre dois mundos, by Daniel Aarão Reis Filho.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
June 2015
