Trajectories of Empire

This superb essay collection impressively spans the African diaspora experience from the fifteenth century to the present day. A range of excellent and highly readable contributions examine music, history, art, and literature, among other subjects.It is difficult to summarize the diverse topics covered here, especially since each creative, well-written essay engages the reader's interest in so many different ways. The book is structured roughly chronologically, starting with Iberian contextualization, then moving on to essays related to more developed colonial settings, and finally offering insights into recent decades of activism in Cuba and Brazil.The first essay, by Elizabeth R. Wright, provides a close reading of the surviving chronicle of the first enslaved West Africans purposely captured and brought to Portugal in 1444, highlighting the moment when the “Iberian Black Atlantic [was] taking shape before the chronicler's eyes” as well as the impact of this account on future commentators from Miguel de Cervantes to Bartolomé de Las Casas (p. 18). Miguel A. Valerio's contribution also sets the stage in the fifteenth century, examining early confraternity documents that highlight the main goals of these organizations—ancestor worship, communal identity focused on sustaining a much-needed network to help members, and respectful death rituals. Valerio also presents fascinating glimpses into early modern African diaspora festive culture, which included dance troupes, music from hundreds of drums, and the pageantry of lavish processions. This research offers an intriguing contrast to Jerome C. Branche's contribution, which uses hagiographic-type sources to present a saintly woman called Chicaba, also known as Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, from the perspective of the experience of social death in the African diaspora. Bridging these two differing interpretations is Manuel Olmedo Gobante's entertaining, thought-provoking essay on the subtleties of Afro-Iberian involvement in early modern martial arts and sword culture. The essay notes that fencing, an extremely popular discipline at this time, was viewed as a liberal art and an intellectual pursuit. As such, this essay argues that the prominence of certain Black swordsmen and their fictional portrayals in literature (and even the visual arts, with excellent illustrations provided) complicate common understandings of race in early modern Europe.The second section includes the most diverse and wide-ranging essays, offering insights from the visual arts, poetry, and medical history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz discusses paintings and photographs of the faces of enslaved individuals, grouping them as images of domestic servants to show the prestige of the person who features more centrally in the painting, faces painted to prove the painter's talents, and ethnographic, legalistic images. No mention was made of the numerous late medieval and early modern Black Magi paintings, which made a clear statement about European imperialism and Christianity—perhaps they could be grouped into both of the first two categories? Continuing on a visual arts theme, Baltasar Fra-Molinero's essay creatively interprets the famous 1599 portrait Los mulatos de Esmeraldas with an Afro-futurist lens and makes an intriguing connection between the painting and the fictional Wakanda of recent films. Returning to texts, Lúcia Helena Costigan beautifully and empathetically re-creates the lives of two Brazilian poets, most memorably the sad story of the poverty-stricken Afro-Brazilian Domingos Caldas Barbosa and his eighteenth-century influence on Portuguese songs and literature. The final contribution in this wide-ranging section is Cassia Roth's essay on Brazilian physicians' reports on Black and white women's reproductive experiences, which provides an insightful discussion of pain and the emotional history of slavery. Roth provokes her readers to engage our own reactions to the gruesome medical accounts cited in her essay as a way to question “the fake neutrality and objective nature of scholarly inquiry” (p. 201).The book ends with two engaging contributions on recent Afro-Brazilian cultural history. In a stimulating discussion of how recent conditions can connect to themes in the history of slavery (from the still-relevant concept of senzalas to fugitive narratives), Eliseo Jacob examines the concept of quilombismo in the lyrics of four rap songs composed in the last two decades. And Maria Andrea dos Santos Soares poignantly presents a 2012 performance/protest organized by the late Zózimo Bulbul to memorialize the complex history of the Valongo Wharf in Rio. The author contextualizes the event with a discussion of how some aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture, after centuries of repression and illegality, became part of national folklore during the Estado Novo era and were eventually reduced to commodified touristic attractions.The consistently high-quality work contained within this volume is a testament to Branche's remarkable editorial skills. Educators can pick and choose among these engaging essays depending on the classes they are teaching, but the entire volume provides a very useful overview of five centuries of complex cultural dynamics in the Iberian Atlantic. These essays would add to a range of courses, from medieval studies to contemporary art and activism, and will surely interest many levels of students

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