Enslaved Women, Family, and Resistance in the Hinterlands of Northeast Brazil, Ceara, 1804-1888

FAIN: FT-59899-12

Martha S. Santos
University of Akron, Main Campus (Akron, OH 44325-0001)

This book project examines the experiences of slavery and resistance for women of color in the backlands of the Brazilian Northeastern province of Ceara during the years between 1804 and the abolition of slavery in 1888. Confronting an overall lack of attention in the scholarship to the ways in which gender expectations and relations shaped different experiences of slavery for men and for women, this study makes female slaves the subjects of historical analysis and provides a rich perspective of Brazilian slavery in an understudied rural context. In revealing how enslaved women of African descent manipulated their circumstances to open up opportunities for freedom, this study also demonstrates that the contestatory practices of female slaves in a peripheral region of the Americas were contingent on gender and race, and also on the conditions that shaped their captivity.