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Accepted Paper:

Slave, freed, and free women: succeeding generations of Africans and Afro-descendants in eighteenth and nineteenth century Minas Gerais  
Douglas Libby (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

Paper short abstract:

Examines the trajectory of 7 generations of Afro-Brazilian women and how they dealt with property and power in 18th- and 19th-century Minas. The unfolding lives of succeeding generations serve as a basis for analyzing family formation, social and gender relations, occupational and social mobility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the trajectory of a West African slave couple and six generations of their descendents in the Vila do São José do Rio das Mortes over a period of some 160 years (c. 1735 - c. 1895), in particular the trajectory of the female members of this family. The research is based on diverse types of primary sources that are subjected to intense and systematic cross referencing. The narrative built around the unfolding lives of succeeding generations aims at providing a varied set of ways of analyzing family formation, certain levels of social and gender relations, occupational opportunities, and the complexities of social mobility in the context of a small urban center in colonial and provincial Minas Gerais. The extraordinary geographical stability of this "colored" family of what can be considered middling social and economic standing challenges the notion that non-elite populations were constantly on the move in during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a similar vein, the remarkable importance that family relationships themselves took on over time is revealed when looking at patterns of repeated gestures of familial solidarity and inflection. Women (wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, mothers and daughters in law, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers) made important contributions to the rootedness and tight-knitted character of the family, claiming and holding on to their fair share of property as well as to the power forged out of the clan's hard-won respectability within the local community.

Panel P15
Women, land and power in the European Empires
  Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2013, -