João José Reis. Divining Slavery and Freedom

Once upon a time, historians of slavery and emancipation in Brazil labored under the misapprehension that the majority of the records pertaining to the enslaved had been lost or destroyed. Thus, they believed that it would be impossible to write the sort of detailed histories about life and labor under slavery being published elsewhere. A handful of pioneering studies on plantation slavery in specific counties did offer a somewhat more intimate view of the slave-plantation complex, but most studies of slavery in Brazil published prior to the 1980s tended to be macro-historical or to rely heavily on the writings of political elites and foreign travelers. Over the last few decades, a new generation of scholars of slavery and emancipation—most of them based in Brazil, a few in the U.S.—eager to move beyond the structuralism of their predecessors, have succeeded in unearthing a remarkable range of sources, including notarial documents, birth registers, trial records, letters of manumission, tax and property rolls, and obscure periodicals, that have offered a far more granular view of the lives of slaves and ex-slaves, one that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of historians. And within this cohort of historical researchers, no one has done more to transform the historiography of slavery and African culture in Brazil than João José Reis. Probably best known for his 1986 study of a Muslim-led slave revolt in Bahia, Reis has dedicated his career to researching and analyzing the worlds of slaves and freedpersons, most of them of African birth, in nineteenth-century Bahia, and its capital city of Salvador. His scholarship has not only greatly expanded the historical knowledge of his home region, but has helped make Bahia a crucial locale for any discussion of slavery in the Americas or the African Diaspora. One indication of the range and influence of Reis’s work in the transnational scholarly community is its wide availability—the book under review here, Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, is the third of his major monographs to be translated and published in English.

Art · Emancipation · Genealogy · Historiography · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Colonial Brazil · Law