Oscar De La Torre
Biographic Data
| ID | 679629 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Oscar De La Torre |
| GIVEN NAMES | Oscar |
| FAMILY NAME | De La Torre |
| SIGNATURE | DE LA TORRE O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6332-1926 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)
The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil . Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg
Journal Article The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil. Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg Get access The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil. Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 329 pp. $135.00). Oscar de la Torre Oscar de la Torre University of North Carolina, Charlotte [email protected] Search for …
The Well That Wept Blood
This article uses the oral myth of a blood-weeping water well from a small city in the Amazon River to discuss the origins and the significance of haunted waterscapes for Black Amazonians. According to this myth, a well that still exists on the lands of an ancient sugar plantation weeps blood to mourn the slaves whose bodies were carelessly thrown there after a life of exploitation and abuse. The article tracks the history of the myth by interrog…
An Excellent Hunter: Environmental Creolization and the Paths to Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Amazonia
If slave societies in the Atlantic world were based on "creole ecologies," that is, on bringing enslaved African workers to the Americas to cultivate an Asian crop (sugar), then how would those workers' acquisition of environmental knowledge alter such a project? In this article I argue that a fruitful response to that question lies in the concept of environmental creolization: the process of familiarization with New World environments that ensla…
Merle L. Bowen. For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil
In the last thirty years, Black people living in rural Brazil have mobilized politically on the basis of their ethnoracial identity, a departure from their twentieth-century participation in class-based organizations, such as rural labor unions and landless peasant movements. The main factor behind this change was the well-studied Article 68 of the 1988 Constitution’s transitory dispositions, which initially granted collective land deeds to desce…
O massacre dos libertos: Sobre raça e república no Brasil (1888-1889)
Historians of Atlantic slavery live in a brave new world. Some years ago, books crossing national borders via comparison, connection, or synthesis were considered pioneering works at best and mere oddities at worst. That is no longer the case. While the traditional concerns and approaches of the different national historiographies of Brazil, the United States, and Cuba continue to be alive and kicking, these historiographies now exchange topics a…
The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
Every new generation of historians formulates new questions to interrogate the past and provides new answers to existing ones. Drawing from a renewed Atlantic historiography that in recent decades has emphasized interimperial ties and networks and from recent discussions about Afro-Cubans' place in their nation's history, Elena A. Schneider's award-winning The Occupation of Havana provides a bold reinterpretation, rooted in new and exciting findi…
Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia
Landscapes of Freedom is a meticulous and innovative study of slavery and the postemancipation decades on the Pacific coast of Colombia. In “the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by black people,” enslaved Africans and their descendants appropriated the tropical rain forest to achieve the highest levels of autonomy of almost anywhere in the enslaved Americas, Leal argues (p. 5). In the decades after abolition, Afro-Colombians maint…
The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945
In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians …
People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945
De caboclos a bem‐te‐vis. Formação do campesinato numa sociedade escravista: Maranhão 1800–1850 ‐ by Assunção, Matthias Röhrig
Sites of Memory and Time Slips: Narratives of the “Good Master” and the History of Brazilian Slavery
Oral histories about slavery and the postemancipation period in Brazil and other regions of the Americas often contain descriptions of masters who were kind and humane to their slaves. This article takes one such testimony as a point of departure to analyze why descendants of slaves depicted former masters in a positive light. It argues that, instead of indicating forms of false consciousness and naiveté, narratives of good masters often reflect …
Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony by Peter M. Beattie
Concebendo a liberdade
.
A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826-1865
Brazilian historian Tâmis Parron argues in this study that during the nineteenth century the defense of slavery formed a “network of political and social relations” (p. 18) whose internal logic and broader historical connections were not the mere result of the existence of the institution. Rather, political debates about slavery were a “vector of partisan, ideological, and parliamentary relations” (p. 16) throughout the early and central decades …
The Land is Ours and We Are Free to Do All that We Want”: Quilombos and Black Rural Protest in Amazonia, Brazil, 1917-1929 1
The Land is Ours and We Are Free to Do All that We Want”: Quilombos and Black Rural Protest in Amazonia, Brazil, 1917-1929 1
A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826-1865
Brazilian historian Tâmis Parron argues in this study that during the nineteenth century the defense of slavery formed a “network of political and social relations” (p. 18) whose internal logic and broader historical connections were not the mere result of the existence of the institution. Rather, political debates about slavery were a “vector of partisan, ideological, and parliamentary relations” (p. 16) throughout the early and central decades …
Concebendo a liberdade
.
Sites of Memory and Time Slips: Narratives of the “Good Master” and the History of Brazilian Slavery
Oral histories about slavery and the postemancipation period in Brazil and other regions of the Americas often contain descriptions of masters who were kind and humane to their slaves. This article takes one such testimony as a point of departure to analyze why descendants of slaves depicted former masters in a positive light. It argues that, instead of indicating forms of false consciousness and naiveté, narratives of good masters often reflect …
Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony by Peter M. Beattie
The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945
In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians …
People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945
De caboclos a bem‐te‐vis. Formação do campesinato numa sociedade escravista: Maranhão 1800–1850 ‐ by Assunção, Matthias Röhrig
Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia
Landscapes of Freedom is a meticulous and innovative study of slavery and the postemancipation decades on the Pacific coast of Colombia. In “the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by black people,” enslaved Africans and their descendants appropriated the tropical rain forest to achieve the highest levels of autonomy of almost anywhere in the enslaved Americas, Leal argues (p. 5). In the decades after abolition, Afro-Colombians maint…
O massacre dos libertos: Sobre raça e república no Brasil (1888-1889)
Historians of Atlantic slavery live in a brave new world. Some years ago, books crossing national borders via comparison, connection, or synthesis were considered pioneering works at best and mere oddities at worst. That is no longer the case. While the traditional concerns and approaches of the different national historiographies of Brazil, the United States, and Cuba continue to be alive and kicking, these historiographies now exchange topics a…
The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
Every new generation of historians formulates new questions to interrogate the past and provides new answers to existing ones. Drawing from a renewed Atlantic historiography that in recent decades has emphasized interimperial ties and networks and from recent discussions about Afro-Cubans' place in their nation's history, Elena A. Schneider's award-winning The Occupation of Havana provides a bold reinterpretation, rooted in new and exciting findi…
Merle L. Bowen. For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil
In the last thirty years, Black people living in rural Brazil have mobilized politically on the basis of their ethnoracial identity, a departure from their twentieth-century participation in class-based organizations, such as rural labor unions and landless peasant movements. The main factor behind this change was the well-studied Article 68 of the 1988 Constitution’s transitory dispositions, which initially granted collective land deeds to desce…
The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil . Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg
Journal Article The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil. Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg Get access The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil. Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 329 pp. $135.00). Oscar de la Torre Oscar de la Torre University of North Carolina, Charlotte [email protected] Search for …
The Well That Wept Blood
This article uses the oral myth of a blood-weeping water well from a small city in the Amazon River to discuss the origins and the significance of haunted waterscapes for Black Amazonians. According to this myth, a well that still exists on the lands of an ancient sugar plantation weeps blood to mourn the slaves whose bodies were carelessly thrown there after a life of exploitation and abuse. The article tracks the history of the myth by interrog…
An Excellent Hunter: Environmental Creolization and the Paths to Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Amazonia
If slave societies in the Atlantic world were based on "creole ecologies," that is, on bringing enslaved African workers to the Americas to cultivate an Asian crop (sugar), then how would those workers' acquisition of environmental knowledge alter such a project? In this article I argue that a fruitful response to that question lies in the concept of environmental creolization: the process of familiarization with New World environments that ensla…
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)
Colonialism, slavery, and trade (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · History (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Ancient history (5 works) · Ethnology (5 works) · Geography (5 works) · Politics (5 works)