Slave Subjectivities In The Iberian Worlds

The Iberian world played a key role in the global trade of enslaved people from the 15th century onwards. Scholars of Iberian forms of slavery face challenges accessing the subjectivity of the enslaved, given the scarcity of autobiographical sources. This book offers a compelling example of innovative methodologies that draw on alternative archives and documents, such as inquisitorial and trial records, to examine enslaved individuals' and collective subjectivities under Iberian political dominion. It explores themes such as race, gender, labour, social mobility and emancipation, religion, and politics, shedding light on the lived experiences of those enslaved in the Iberian world from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Contributors are: Magdalena Candioti, Robson Pedroso Costa, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, James Fujitani, Michel Kabalan, Silvia Lara, Marta Macedo, Hebe Mattos, Michelle McKinley, Sophia Blea Nuñez, Fernanda Pinheiro, João José Reis, Patricia Faria de Souza, Lisa Surwillo, Miguel Valerio and Lisa Voigt.

This volume contributes to the growing field of Early Modern Jewish Atlantic History, while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is a collection of substantive, sophisticated and variegated essays, combining case studies with theoretical reflections, organized into three sections: race and blood, metropoles and colonies, and history and memory. Twelve chapters treat converso slave traders, race and early Afro-Portuguese relations in West Africa, Sephardim and people of color in nineteenth-century Curaçao, Portuguese converso/Sephardic imperialist behavior, Caspar Barlaeus’ attitude toward Jews in the Sephardic Atlantic, Jewish-Creole historiography in eighteenth-century Suriname, Savannah’s eighteenth-century Sephardic community in an Altantic setting, Freemasonry and Sephardim in the British Empire, the figure of Columbus in popular literature about the Caribbean, key works of Caribbean postcolonial literature on Sephardim, the holocaust, slavery and race, Canadian Jewish identity in the reception history of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and Moroccan-Jewish memories of a sixteenth-century Portuguese military defeat.

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

Drawing heavily on Inquisition sources, this book rereads the the nexus of politics, race and religion among three newly and incompletely Christianized groups in the seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic world: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians.

In this work, Adam Knobler demonstrates the intimate connection between medieval mythologies of the non-Western world, and early modern European imperial expansion to Africa, Asia and the Americas.

An exploration of how Afro-Mexicans affirmed their culture, subjectivities and colonial condition through festive culture and performance.

In this volume historians, anthropologists, musicologists, political scientists and literary scholars address different dimensions of cosmopolitanism in Portugal, Brazil, Angola and other parts of the world. Migrants, traders, writers, freemasons, architects, conservative and postcolonial politicians are among the figures analysed here.

Through engagement with the ‘Slaving Zones' theory, our authors elucidate new and complimentary ways in which identity, law, custom, political organization, and definitions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ have impacted the course of global slavery from ancient times through the present