In this book historian Ana Lucia Araujo examines Biard's Brazil with special attention to what she calls his "tropical romanticism" a vision of the country with an emphasis on the exotic.

Frontiers of Citizenship is an engagingly-written, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and the origins of Brazil's 'racial democracy'. Through groundbreaking archival research that brings the stories of slaves, Indians, and settlers to life, Yuko Miki challenges the widespread idea that Brazilian Indians 'disappeared' during the colonial era, paving the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation. Focusing on the postcolonial settlement of the Atlantic frontier and Rio de Janeiro, Miki argues that the exclusion and inequality of indigenous and African-descended people became embedded in the very construction of Brazil's remarkably inclusive nationhood. She demonstrates that to understand the full scope of central themes in Latin American history - race and national identity, unequal citizenship, popular politics, and slavery and abolition - one must engage the histories of both the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas.

In der Buchreihe des "Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies" werden Monographien und Tagungsbände, die das Phänomen der Sklaverei und andere Formen asymmetrischer Abhängigkeiten in Gesellschaften untersuchen, veröffentlicht. Die Reihe folgt dabei der Forschungsagenda des BCDSS, die die vorherrschende dichotomische Vorstellung von "Sklaverei versus Freiheit" überwindet. Das Cluster hat dazu ein neues Schlüsselkonzept ("asymmetrische Abhängigkeiten") entwickelt, das alle Ausprägungen von ungleichen Dependenzen (wie etwa Schuldknechtschaft, Zwangsarbeit, Dienstbarkeit, Leibeigenschaft, Hausarbeit, aber auch gewisse Formen der Lohnarbeit und der Patronage) berücksichtigt. Dabei werden auch Epochen, Räume und Kontexte der Weltgeschichte bearbeitet, die nicht der europäischen Kolonisierung ausgesetzt waren (z.B. altorientalische Kulturen sowie vormoderne und moderne Gesellschaften in Asien, Afrika und den Amerikas).

From 1865-1866, James accompanied the director of the recently established Museum of Comparative Zoology on a research expedition to Brazil. This critical, bilingual (English-Portuguese) edition of his diaries and letters includes reproductions of his drawings. This original material belongs to the Houghton Archives at Harvard University.

2023 Honorable Mention, Brazil Section Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) This book explores visual portrayals of blackness in Brazil to reveal the integral role of visual culture in crafting race and nation across Latin America. In the early twentieth century, Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy. Anadelia Romo shows that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city. These efforts combined with a growing promotion of tourism to transform what had been one of the busiest slaving depots in the Americas into a popular tourist enclave celebrated for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture. Vibrant illustrations and texts by the likes of Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and others contributed to a distinctive iconography of the city, with Afro-Bahians at its center. But these optimistic visions of inclusion, Romo reveals, concealed deep racial inequalities. Illustrating how these visual archetypes laid the foundation for Salvador’s modern racial landscape, this book unveils the ways ethnic and racial populations have been both included and excluded not only in Brazil but in Latin America as a whole.

This complex account by a German governess examines households, families, and slavery in Brazil, and bears witness to how “the world the slaveholders made” would soon collapse. Ina von Binzer’s letters, published in German in 1887 and translated into English for this book, offer a rare view of three very different elite family households during the twilight years of Brazil’s Second Empire. Her woman’s gaze contrasts markedly with other contributions to the contemporary travel literature on Brazil that were nearly entirely written by men. Although von Binzer covers a multitude of topics—ranging from the management of households and plantations, the behavior of slaves and slaveowners, and the agricultural production of coffee and sugar to examinations of family relations, childrearing, culinary repertoires, and life on the street—the common theme running through her letters is the dawning perception that the world the slaveholders made could not long endure. She delves into the inevitable arrival of abolition as a national issue and a nascent movement—a destiny that her employers could no longer ignore. In recounting her conversations with them, she offers her own insights into their opinions and behaviors that make for a fascinating insider’s view of a world about to disappear. Von Binzer’s letters are prefaced by a valuable historical introduction that surveys the contexts of slavery’s slow demise after 1850 and offers new biographical research on von Binzer and the prominent families who employed her. A map of her travels together with dozens of photographs contemporary with her residence in Brazil provide visual documentation complementary to her letters.

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.