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Paper short abstract:

Sexual unions between Iberian men and African women were tolerated, and common, in the early Spanish Caribbean, even among elites. This paper argues that the prominence of “Portuguese” migrants among these men points to direct continuities linking the Spanish Caribbean and the Upper Guinea Coast.

Paper long abstract:

Historians of Cuba and Puerto Rico have argued that as early as the sixteenth century, Iberian elites were intent on creating a racialized social order, and that Iberian men who married women of color would be marginalized. While these interpretations are consistent with our knowledge of late colonial plantation societies and twentieth-century race relations, extant sources generated during the Iberian "joint crown" period (1580-1640) paint a very different picture of the Spanish circum-Caribbean. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ecclesiastical records, censuses, notarial records, shipping records, and other sources depict African and African-descended women as the wives and concubines of Iberian men. In this paper, I argue that these relationships—including both informal sexual unions and church-sanctioned marriages—may be viewed in light of earlier patterns of cross-cultural exchange on the Upper Guinea coast. Furthermore, the Iberian men in many of these marriages and sexual unions were explicitly identified as "Portuguese," suggesting not only the importance of Luso-African precedents in the social formations of Spanish Caribbean society, but also direct continuities. By the late sixteenth century, Spanish circum-Caribbean ports such as Havana, Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and Panama were home to Portuguese, African, and Luso-African migrants of both sexes who were already familiar with cross-cultural sexual unions in the context of overlapping Iberian and sub-Saharan African worlds.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the accuracy of considering “race” a determinant factor in early Afro-Portuguese relationships. The role of contrasting Western African representations is emphasized. Jewish communities of Portuguese and Luso-African descent are a case in point both in Senegal and Amsterdam.

Paper long abstract:

In the historiography of the early Portuguese Empire in Africa, the concepts of "race" and "race relations" are frequently presented to explain Afro-Portuguese relationships. This approach disregards the absence of a modern concept of "race". Recent scholarship has acknowledged that until the 18th century the definition of "race" ("raça") by Portuguese authorities was not associated with any presumed intrinsic "racial" inferiority of people of African descent but rather with religion and slave origins. The attitude of the same authorities towards "race" differed depending on the social context of the "colonial" spaces in question. This paper intends to replace the predominant approach of the History of Empires, focused on a European 'problématique', by stressing the African counterpart. In the Western African context, as well as in the increasingly creolized Cape Verde society, being "Black" and being "White" was not a question of skin color but of social status. Jewish communities in northern Senegambia (founded c. 1606) and their connections with the United Provinces communities contribute to an understanding of the relevance of this African-born representation of identity. In the early 17th century, Jews of African descent were acknowledged as full members of the Portuguese Jewish communities in Guiné and in Amsterdam. A "racial thought" approach to the relationship involved is misleading.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes how racialist thinking was complicated in Suriname by a Portuguese Jewish ethos centered on language (Portuguese and Spanish), religion (Judaism), and historical consciousness of a common Jewish past, an ethos that extended Jewish communal belonging to Eurafrican Jews.

Paper long abstract:

Portuguese Jews established an autonomous community in Suriname in the 1650s, sanctioned and recognized by successive English and Dutch colonial authorities until its official disintegration in the early 1800s. This autonomy, together with their legal status as both white and free, allowed Jews to own both land and slaves. This autonomy also enabled Jews to gradually open the doors of their community to enslaved and manumitted individuals of Eurafrican and (to a lesser extent) African ancestry, who were accepted as bona fide Jews, albeit of second tier status.

The uninterrupted, diachronic records of the Jewish communal authorities (the Mahamad)—never before systematically examined—allow us to trace the redefinition of "Jew" in Suriname through time and to gauge the process by which Jews of Eurafrican ancestry (sometimes with the aid of their white family members) fought for first-tier status in the Jewish community and struggled to transmit their Jewish identity to the next generation. The influence of the "mother community" of Amsterdam (through both migration and Jewish communal legislation) and possible connections of Suriname's early Jewish community to Senegambia (through migration of seventeenth-century Eurafrican Jewish families) indicate that the self-image of Suriname's Jews was constructed in a dynamic, trans-Atlantic context. The institution of slavery and its social consequences took center stage in the construction of this new Jewish and Eurafrican identity.

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Paper short abstract:

Using data from a variety of sources, including the soon to be launched Slave Biographies: Atlantic Slave Data Network, this paper explores how Church and secular officials categorized people in terms of race and ethnicity in a variety of records in the early periods of trans-Atlantic interactions

Paper long abstract:

Using data from a variety of sources, including the soon to be launched Slave Biographies: the Atlantic Slave Data Network (http://slavebiographies.org/project/ ), this paper explores how Church and secular officials categorized people in terms of race and ethnicity in a variety of records in the early periods of trans-Atlantic interactions. It is from records that historians know what they know, so this paper begins with records. Among those the paper considers are books of baptism, marriage, birth, and death , commercial journals, and inventories. The paper is particularly concerned with documentation about Upper Guineans in Africa and diaspora. It considers how and why categories were assigned in a variety of records. It ponders whether or not racial and ethnic designations that appear in sources had then the meaning that historians assume they had. Did a slave's profession of a Mandinka identity in the Americas mean that "being Mandinka" meant something in Africa? If so, what did it mean there and in the New World? If ethnic identities were fluid, does their inclusion in a database distort past reality? With regard to race, the paper asks what can be taken from descriptions of people as "black," "white" and "mullato" in the Americas and whether or not those categories had different meanings (or any meaning) across the ocean in Guiné.

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Paper short abstract:

From a chapter of Mission Evangelica... from Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, we intend to discuss the production and the writing of the missionary texts in order to understand how the European missionaries thought about the African and organized the program of his conversion.

Paper long abstract:

The missionary literature on the Kongo and Mbundu formations is one of the most important source for understanding the historical dynamics of societies in the territory that is now Angola, and has been abundantly used by authors from various fields of social sciences. Its nature as lived and nearly instantaneous testimony of a given reality, gives them a dimension of indisputable authenticity. However, research has overlooked the fact that the missionary report is, at the same time, a construction of reality and an instrument for intervention on it. By their ethnographic character, missionary writing sets out, from its author, a relationship of power and authority that builds the African as an object of knowledge and of transformation worked by the action of proselytizing missionaries.

From a chapter of Mission Evangelica... from Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, we intend to discuss how the European missionaries thought about the African and organized the program of his conversion. Analyze the conditions of production of the missionary text, deconstruct, in its architecture and conceptual rhetoric, the way it represent the African reality, is a necessary step to fully understanding the social and cultural dynamics that sets the region of Angola during this period, as Marie Louise Pratt would call it, a "contact zone"; it allows, at the same time, to evaluate the historical density of Africanist discourse, understood as Christopher L. Miller, as a set of rhetorical devices that builds the historically lasting image of Africa in European literature.

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Paper short abstract:

How can we evalue the impact of ethnic percepcions in a portuguese society where the idea slavery cohabited with the notion of citizenship until the end of the XIX century ? This paper aims to contribute to current debates on the specifity of the portuguese slavery in the European context.

Paper long abstract:

How did slavery evolve in Portugal after the laws of 1761 and 1773 promulgated by the Marquis of Pombal which marked the end of four centuries of atlantic slave trade ? How can we evalue the impact of ethnic percepcions in a portuguese society where the idea slavery cohabited with the notion of citizenship until the end of the XIX century ? These are some of the questions which will be discussed in this paper who aims to contribute to current debates on the specifity of the portuguese slavery in the European context.