Freedom's Horizon : Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mota, Isadora Moura.

Series:

America in the Nineteenth Century Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Antislavery movements--Brazil--History--19th century.

Antislavery movements.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--Brazil--History--19th century.

Enslaved persons.

Geopolitics--Brazil--History--19th century.

Geopolitics.

Black people--Political activity--Brazil--History--19th century.

Black people.

Literacy--Social aspects--Brazil--History--19th century.

Literacy.

Brazil--History--Empire, 1822-1889.

Brazil.

Brazil--Race relations--Political aspects--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (302 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Summary:

"This book is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. In the last country to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Between the 1840s and 1860s, they acted on the idea that the end of slavery anywhere placed freedom on the horizon in Brazil. Thus, they pursued alliances with British diplomats, rose in arms at the sight of both Union and Confederate warships off Brazil's Atlantic coast, sought free soil at foreign consulates, on ships, and in maroon settlements (called quilombos), and organized uprisings for immediate abolition after learning of international emancipation struggles in the newspapers. This book shows that through flight, marronage, rebellion, and literacy practices, enslaved and freedpeoples developed a geopolitical imagination in dialogue with the British campaign against the slave trade (banned in Brazil in 1850), French antislavery, the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War in South America. This book shows that abolitionism was more than just the cause of North Atlantic reformers, Latin American modernizing elites, or middle class advocates. It was a grassroots movement originating in the social and conceptual worlds of the enslaved and connected to a hemispheric black radical tradition"--Publisher's description.

Contents:

African lives and grassroots diplomacy

Insurgent abolitionism

A forgotten battleground of the US Civil War

Reading for freedom

Quilombos and the politics of emancipation

How the enslaved storied their world.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781512827620

1512827622

OCLC:

1477998932