Recreating Africa: Race, religion, and sexuality in the African -Portuguese world, 1441--1770.
Item
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Title
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Recreating Africa: Race, religion, and sexuality in the African -Portuguese world, 1441--1770.
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Identifier
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AAI9946224
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identifier
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9946224
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Creator
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Sweet, James Hoke.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Colin A. Palmer
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, Latin American | History, Black | History, African
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Abstract
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This dissertation focuses on African peoples and the cultures they created in the Portuguese colonial world between 1441 and 1770, with a particular emphasis on the slave communities of Brazil. By raising questions that originate in Africa rather than in the colonial worlds, this study departs from most scholarly works on the African presence in early slave communities. The central question that I am raising is: To what extent were specific African cultural practices transferred across the broader diaspora?;In answering this question, I make three arguments. First, despite the re-creation of African kinship structures and some kin-like institutions, the temporal conditions of slavery---breaks in lineage, stolen childhood, death, disease, hunger, low fertility, and physical abuse---were overwhelming and inescapable. Second, slave resistance among Africans did not manifest itself in the ways that scholars have typically understood resistance. Africans and their immediate descendants addressed the institution of slavery and its attendant uncertainties with the most potent weapons at their disposal---not muscle and might, but religion and spirituality. For example, in seventeenth-century Brazil, Africans utilized a variety of Mbundu ritual practices and beliefs---divinations, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, cures, spiritual cults, and so on---as a way of addressing their oppression. These findings challenge widely-held notions that African slaves were unable to replicate specific African "institutions" in the Americas. African religions were not "syncretic" or "creolized," but were independent systems of thought that were practiced parallel to Catholicism. When significant creolization did occur among Africans beginning in the eighteenth century, it was most salient among Ganguelas and Minas, or Ndembos and Ardas; not Africans and Catholics.;Finally, I argue that where Africans and their descendants adopted the Catholic faith they often created a distinct brand of African Catholicism. At the same time, I demonstrate that whites, including some priests, were embracing certain African religious practices, in spite of the Church's insistence that African rituals and beliefs were the work of the Devil. Though much was shared and exchanged, the parallel beliefs of Europeans and Africans remained distinct throughout the period of my study.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
