The Iberian world played a key role in the global trade of enslaved people from the 15th century onwards. Scholars of Iberian forms of slavery face challenges accessing the subjectivity of the enslaved, given the scarcity of autobiographical sources. This book offers a compelling example of innovative methodologies that draw on alternative archives and documents, such as inquisitorial and trial records, to examine enslaved individuals' and collective subjectivities under Iberian political dominion. It explores themes such as race, gender, labour, social mobility and emancipation, religion, and politics, shedding light on the lived experiences of those enslaved in the Iberian world from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.
Ãngela Barreto Xavier is a Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. She has widely published on issues relating with questions of power and domination and the agency and subjectivities of subaltern people in the context of the Portuguese early-modern empire.
Cristina Nogueira da Silva is Professor at the Law School of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and researcher at its research center, CEDIS. Her main research areas are classical liberalism and citizenship in the nineteenth century, the history of the legal personal status in the Portuguese overseas territories, as well as the way legal concepts and institutions were used by enslaved and free subaltern people in the context of the Portuguese contemporary empire.
Michel Cahen is a political historian of modern colonial Portugal and contemporary Portuguese-speaking Africa. He is emeritus CNRS Senior Researcher at the Centre âLes Afriques dans le mondeâ (Sciences Po Bordeaux). His main interests relate to Marxism and nationalism, identity and citizenship, political identity at the margins, coloniality and globalisation.
Introduction: Slave SubjectivitiesâStudying Absences?
âÃngela Barreto Xavier, Cristina Nogueira da Silva, and Michel Cahen
Part 1: Slave Subjectivities in Asia
1 âWhere All Yndios Are Freeâ
âIdentity, Resistance, and Dissonant Perceptions about the Enslavement of Japanese in the Iberian World (16thâ17th Centuries)
âRômulo da Silva Ehalt
2 The Concubine Slaves of the Portuguese in the China Sea Region
âJames Fujitani
3 From Asia to Lisbon
âFragments of Lives and Subjectivities of the Enslaved (16thâ17th Centuries)
âPatricia Souza de Faria
Part 2: Subjectivities in the Context of Labour and Religion
5 âPública NotÃciaâ
âBlack Brotherhoods and Corporate Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century Brazil
âLisa Voigt
6 Creolizing Death
âAfro-Catholic Deathways in the Early Modern Iberian World
âMiguel A. Valerio
7 Black Masters
âA Study on Slave-Owning Slaves, 1790â1850, Pernambuco, Brazil
âRobson Pedrosa Costa
8 The Qurʾan in My Notebook
âSlavery, Revolt and the Teaching of Arabic in the 1830s Bahia, Brazil
âMichel Kabalan
Part 3: Social Mobility and Emancipation
9 Central African Echoes in the Wilds of Pernambuco, Brazil, in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century)
âSilvia Hunold Lara
10 Henrique Dias and the Portuguese Empire: Narrative, Subjectivity and Memory
âHebe Mattos
11 Against âUnjust Captivityâ
âLisbonâs Brotherhoods of Black and âPardoâ Menâs Litigious Action and the Struggle for the End of Slavery in the Kingdom of Portugal
âFernanda Domingos Pinheiro
12 Negotiating Emancipation and Social Mobility
âCrosscrossed Biographies of Africans and Afrodescendants in the RÃo de la Plata (1810â1840)
âMagdalena Candioti
13 Petitioning from the Body: Cuba and Spain in 1873
âLisa Surwillo
Postface: Enslavement, Race, Liberty and Emotion
âMichelle A. McKinley
Index
This book is of interest for doctoral and post-graduate researchers, as well as scholars of different disciplines â History, Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, and so on. It is for general and specialised libraries, race and gender activists and the general public.