Challenges of Generalization and My Position as a Historian

Writing this hemispheric history also carries challenges. There are very few syntheses of the history of slavery in the Americas. Male scholars identified as white have authored ones that largely focus on the English-speaking Americas.³³ My position is very different from that of these historians.

I was born in the former Third World, now known as the Global South, and English is my third language (after Portuguese and French). I was raised in a peripheric region of southern Brazil known as Rio Grande do Sul, where I spent most of my youth. As far as I know, my ancestors have links with the early Portuguese and Spanish colonizers who settled in the region in the eighteenth century, even though there is no formal recognition that these ancestors ever had children with Indigenous and Black personsвЂ”though, as with any of these early settlers, in a region where there were very few women, this hypothesis is likely. Despite this configuration, typical of many regions in Latin America, I was raised as a white person. This insider position changed in my late twenties, when for nearly a decade I migrated, lived, and studied in the Canadian province of Quebec. In this new context, in a province historically separated from English-speaking Canada, because of my origin, black hair, darker skin, and strong accent, I was identified as a Latina, and therefore labeled as visible minority.

My then-new minority position as a South American woman who had to become fluent in French allowed me to conduct archival research and fieldwork in French-speaking West Africa. My new complex position not only transformed my perspective of the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade but also of the history of Brazil, the country that imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Eventually, I made my academic career as a professor of history in the United States, where I continue to be a Latina.

Still, depending on the political context and the social actors involved, I can be perceived as being white, nonwhite, or a woman of color. But more important, since 2008 I have had the privilege of teaching at a historically Black university, where most of my students and colleagues are racialized as Black persons with roots all over the African diaspora. At Howard University, all students in the humanities and sciences must take courses on the history of the African diaspora. This rich context allowed me to develop multiple courses focusing on the history of slavery, the slave trade, and the African diaspora. Certainly, I benefited from the advantages of being racialized as a white person during my youth in my home country. But after having spent more than twenty years, and basically two-thirds of my adult life, studying and working in North America and Europe, where I am perceived as an outsider in academic circles, I also acquired a different and more distanced perspective of Brazilian history. Through my personal and academic journey as an immigrant, I soon realized how the existence of slavery and the central role of Africans in the construction of the country have been annihilated in Brazilian history and public memory. Once in North America, I also understood how Brazil and the African continent were continually excluded from the historiography of slavery that insisted on focusing on the North Atlantic system, the United States, and the Anglophone world. Hence, in many ways, this book is part of a collective and individual continued effort to recenter Brazil and Africa in this large tragic history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, and to give enslaved women their rightful place in this story. The book is also a testament of more than twenty years studying the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade through archival research and fieldwork in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish on three continents.

Just as any other work of synthesis, this book is not an encyclopedia and obviously remains incomplete.

Not all regions, themes, and periods receive the same attention. These choices were guided by the availability of primary and secondary sources and by my own experience and interests researching and teaching the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and African diaspora history. While providing a comparative and transnational perspective of the history of these human atrocities, the book follows the approach of African diaspora history, which treats the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas as the continuation of their experiences on the African continent.³⁴ The various chapters draw from fieldwork and primary sources in archives, libraries, and museums in Brazil, the Republic of Benin, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, France, and Portugal conducted between 1999 and 2023. I also rely on the work of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and art historians who excavated archives and uncovered objects, songs, dances, martial arts, and testimonies in order to study in detail the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in various regions and periods.

My point of departure to write an Atlantic history of slavery was the idea that, despite specific national and regional contexts and the trends that oriented the Atlantic slave trade from disparate regions in West Africa and West Central Africa to each part of the Americas, there were also many similarities between the institutions of slavery all over the Americas. As I conducted research and wrote this book, these similarities became even clearer. In all the regions of the Americas where slavery existed to a greater or lesser extent, enslaved Africans and their descendants left deep imprints in urban and rural landscapes, shaping foodways, religions, and cultures. In these various areas, white settlers created mechanisms to prevent the emancipation of enslaved populations and to control freed populations even after the end of slavery. Although the long history associated with slavery and the importance of populations of African descent has been acknowledged in some parts of the Americas more than in others, full recognition of the harms caused by slavery and the Atlantic slave trade remains unachieved, which is why the past of Atlantic slavery remains such an important topic of debate in the public sphere. And this is also why my work, shaped by the approach of memory studies, gives me a unique point of view when writing an Atlantic history of these human atrocities.

Ultimately, the reverberations of this past have remained alive in the present. But because this past still matters, this book proposes to cross this memoryвЂ™s foggy zone and attempt to better understand the long era in which humans racialized as Black were placed in shackles to construct the hemisphere we know today as the Americas.

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Source: Araujo Ana Lucia. Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery. University of Chicago Press,2024. вЂ” 1702 СЂ.. 2024

Challenges of Generalization and My Position as a Historian

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