"In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Provides information on how the enforced diaspora of the slave trade shaped Brazil as a nation. Information about the coming of the first African slaves in 1538; Burgeoning of Brazil's African descended population in the sixteenth century; Reasons for the survival of African cultural traditions in Brazil; Distinctive African stocks in Brazil; Abolishment of the slave trade in Brazil in 1850; Percentage of the 1997 Brazilian population that is of African descent.
Explanations of the Abolitionist movement's success in Brazil (1888) have, since the 1960s and 1970s, emphasized the movement's material context, its class nature, and the agency of the captives. These analyzzes have misunderstood and gradually ignored the movement's formal political history. Even the central role of urban political mobilisation is generally neglected; when it is addressed, it is crippled by lack of informed analysis of its articulation with formal politics and political history. It is time to recover the relationship between Afro-Brazilian agency and the politics of the elite. In this article this is illustrated by analysing two conjunctures critical to the Abolitionist movement: the rise and fall of the reformist Dantas cabinet in 1884-85, and the relationship between the reactionary Cotegipe cabinet (1885-88), the radicalisation of the movement, and the desperate reformism that led to the Golden Law of 13 May 1888.
Review the books The Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in Sao Paulo, 1600-1900, by Muriel Nazzari, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana De Parnaiba, 1580-1822, by Alida C. Metcalf, The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1945, by Dain Borges, and Gosto Do Pecado: Casamento E Sexualidade Nos Manuais De Confessores Dos Seculos XVI E XVII, by Angela Mendes de Almeida.;
Investigates the interface between gender, color/race and public health in Brazil, focusing on the importance of reproductive health for the formation of a black feminism in the country, between the years 1975 to 1993.
Focuses on the book "Casa-grande e senzala," by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. In his book, Freyre introduces the idea of Brazilian racial democracy (democracia racial) and analyzes the views of black people in Brazil. Freyre and his ideas were said to be controversial and racist and many believed that these ideas created myths within society
