What happens when we put Black Studies in conversation with the history of cartography? Katherine McKittrick, one of the key thinkers in Black Geographies, answers this question in a foundational essay when she writes that “Transatlantic slavery…was predicated on various practices of spatialized violence that targeted Black bodies and profited from erasing a Black sense of place.” As a result, she notes, “Black diasporic histories are difficult to track and cartographically map.”¹Katherine McKittrick, "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place," Social & Cultural Geography, 2011, 12: 948.Black Geographies as a subfield emerged in the 2000s to reckon with McKittrick’s argument, mainly, the ways histories of Blackness axiomatically raise questions of free and restricted movement; territorial boundedness and segregation; and fugitivity from the earliest plantations to the present-day prison-industrial complex. For McKittrick, the structural histories of racial disenfranchisement, plantation slavery, and the “relational violences of modernity” collectively necessitate that we consider the diversity of what she calls “alternative mapping practices.” By this she means attending to the spatial organization of maroon communities; hidden escape routes used by those fleeing slavery, as well as the frequent disguising of these escape routes in music and song; and family and genealogical maps maintained by those who had no legal or citizenship status. In this sense, Black Geographies fundamentally asks what may count as a “real” map and, more importantly, what forms of power and privilege the designation of “map” bestows on the objects it labels. Pushing this point, cartography historian Matthew Edney goes so far as to argue that “there is no such thing as cartography.”²Matthew H. Edney, 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1.Edney instead frames “cartography” as an exercise in aestheticizing and naturalizing relations of power; an idealized performance of racialized and colonial hierarchy enacted through its material output, the “map”. Edney’s observation carries special resonance for histories of Black cartography, where scholars have often framed the historic relationship between material cartographic objects and Blackness as an almost axiomatic opposition. And with perhaps good reason: looking at the cartographic archive of the slavery-era Americas, one quickly sees Blackness rendered either as an aestheticized form of subservience to whiteness, or as an irritating anti-colonial node to be eliminated.

As an example of how this tension plays out, we can look to this work from 1773, The Layout of the Conquered Maroon Village Called Boekoe, by Dutch cartographer Juriaan François de Friderici. It depicts the layout of Fort Boekoe, a fortified maroon settlement in what is today Suriname, in northern South America, that was razed by a Dutch militia in September of 1772. The map’s title and aerial-view perspective make it clear that the maroon village itself served as impetus for the map’s creation, yet only as a form of violent erasure: a dialectic that underscores why maroon communities have been such critical points of theorizing for Black Geographies. Yet, also consider the tension Friderici produces in the map’s elaborate title cartouche, held up by a Black figure whose scantily-clad form implicitly references his enslaved status. The figure enacts a colonial fantasy of converting marronage to subservient labor, and here evokes his own subjugation through the map’s material production. Yet, the figure’s equally dominating presence and confident pose also suggest the persistence of maroon life and resistance, even after Fort Boekoe’s seeming destruction.

Black cartographers have long responded to this dialectic of spectacular presence and invisible subjugation that runs through cartographic renderings of Black spaces and places. As one brief case study, in the 1940s, Louise E. Jefferson – a noted African American illustrator and designer – produced a series of works meant to interrogate presumptions of whiteness and the fixity of identity which served as preconditions for depicting the United States as a nation. In her 1945 Uprooted People of the U.S.A., Jefferson depicts abandoned villages, overcrowded transit centers, and internal refugee camps which all emerged because of the dramatic economic and social shifts wrought by the country’s World War II efforts: a depiction of the United States as a country defined by massive internal displacement and populated by what she terms “victims of war.” Her Americans of Negro Lineage, produced the following year, weaves stories and illustrations of Black doctors, musicians, laborers, and politicians together with statistics on Black populations, internal migrations, and the history of slavery.

By recasting the standard political framing of the forty-eight states as an image and icon of the country, Jefferson’s two maps themselves seek new forms of belonging in a nation defined by racial disenfranchisement; and to reckon with how a static map elides the constant histories of migration and identity-making that underly it. In this way, Jefferson’s work responds, perhaps, to one model of Black Geographies that suggests that the visibility of Black histories depends on framing Blackness as “uprooted,” and perhaps in axiomatic opposition to the modern Western nation-state and the material maps which instantiate it. Jefferson’s works provide the impetus to look backward, to ask how Black artists have thought about the history of mapmaking and its relationship to racial formation and especially to racial fixity. Stated bluntly, what demands does Blackness’ inextricability from histories of forced displacement and archival erasure place on those that wish to engage with material maps, a medium that might privilege histories of fixity and boundedness?

I ask this question by looking to the Guia de Caminhantes. Completed from 1816 to 1817, the Guia de Caminhantes (“Guide for Walkers”; hereafter referred to as the Guia), held at the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the few extant cartographic projects completed by a Black artist in the early nineteenth century.

In the Guia’s introductory text, which you see here on the top half of the cover page, its artist, Anastásio de Sant’Anna, identifies himself as an “old” painter of mixed race, and a resident of the city Salvador (also known as Bahia), a major port city in northeastern Brazil where he had long lived and where he completed the work.

The Guia has attracted scarce attention in Portuguese-language scholarship and has never been discussed in English prior to this talk. Yet, it is a rare example of a manuscript map of Brazilian territory produced outside of the context of a military or surveying expedition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Far exceeding its somewhat timid title, the Guia is more properly thought of as an atlas, and indeed, potentially the first one ever produced in Brazil: an unbound grouping of thirteen hand-drawn, hand-colored, aerial-view maps depicting, as the work’s cover page outlines, “Kingdoms and Provinces of America, especially of Brazil.” While it opens, as we will see, with a large hemispheric map of the Americas and a map of Brazil, the rest of the Guia consists of eleven aerial-view maps of Brazil’s captaincies (the name for Portuguese colonial Brazil’s political divisions), which collectively detail their rivers, mountain ranges, beaches, settlements, churches, sugar mills, Indigenous settlements, and roads: all landmarks that would be important to any early nineteenth-century “walker” referenced in the Guia’s title.

The Guia evinces the artist’s intimate knowledge of two centuries of the history of cartography and landscape painting, and these references potently intersect with the social politics around the artist’s racial identity. In turn, as we will see, these maps reproduce and subtly shift conventions of Portuguese military cartography, while also traversing the boundaries between military precision and painterly imagination. Sant’Anna produced, re-framed, and challenged the intersections of empire and racialization in a political and social context in which race strongly stratified—but did not neatly latch onto—the hierarchies of colonial society. In turn, the Guia foregrounds the antiquity and contemporary persistence of Black and Indigenous histories in Brazil and the wider Americas. As if responding to Jefferson’s Uprooted People of the USA more than a century before she produced it, the Guia frames Blackness not as diasporic, but rather as Indigenous to the Americas and in turn constitutive of the modern nation-state. In this way, the Guia starkly contrasts with the maps discussed previously by productively interrogating the opposition of violent colonial cartographies and Black alternative mapping practices. In so doing, it demonstrates how one Black cartographer crafted an intermingled vision of Black, Indigenous, and colonial histories and epistemologies to forge a novel vision of Brazilian national identity on the eve of its independence.

In the Guia’s second map, “Of All Brazil,” Sant’Anna renders latitude with “the city of Bahia” at zero (I’ve indicated Salvador’s location here with a large red dot). The gesture may speak to Sant’Anna’s pride in his home city, but it also testifies to Salvador’s critical political position as Sant’Anna completed the Guia in 1817. Though Salvador had served as the capital of Portuguese colonial Brazil since the mid-sixteenth century, the city had been relegated to secondary status after the capital’s 1763 transfer to Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of miles to the south. Salvador again toyed with primacy in the early nineteenth century as the Portuguese royal court fled the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and temporarily relocated to Brazil, making Brazil the first country in the Americas to house the government seat of a European empire. In 1808, King João VI and his family spent one month in Salvador before moving on to Rio de Janeiro; Rio would remain the Portuguese empire’s temporary capital until the Empire of Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822.

The Portuguese Crown’s relocation to Brazil encouraged the colonial settlement of the Brazilian interior, which prior to this period had been predominantly populated by Indigenous peoples who had been displaced by colonial activity on the coast. This means Sant’Anna completed the Guia during a surge of interest in mapping the country’s interior as a proxy for territorial conquest and implicit civilizing. Sant’Anna’s Guia also seems to preface the Brazilian Empire’s 1824 Constitution, which extended citizenship to anyone born in Brazil, regardless of racial background (though this excluded the millions of people of African descent then enslaved in Brazil). Even then, as Sant’Anna completed the Guia, Brazil’s “Atlantic frontier became a theater of staggering anti-Indigenous violence and the entrenchment of African-based slavery” as a byproduct of increased settlement.

Living in Salvador in the early nineteenth century Sant’Anna would have experienced the political implications of such inequities firsthand. He was part a large, vibrant, diverse Black population in a city that for two centuries had been a major disembarkation point for enslaved Africans in Brazil (and Brazil itself received around forty percent of all enslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries). In Sant’Anna’s time, two thirds of Salvador’s population was of African descent, enslaved and free, while shipping routes—established around the turn of the eighteenth century—directly linked Bahia with West African ports. Anyone walking around Salvador could see evidence of the city’s African character everywhere: African-born merchants dominated the city’s street economy by selling food and African-made textiles, while African languages were as commonly spoken as Portuguese. Bahia’s African populace also shaped its politics: a series of African-led revolts and conspiracies in early nineteenth-century Bahia shook the foundations of the city’s slavery system and its racial order.

Yet outside of the political and social context in which Sant’Anna worked, we have very little other information about him. Portugal’s National Archive contains the earliest known mention of the artist, albeit when Sant’Anna was likely middle-aged: a 1796 judicial proceeding which named Sant’Anna as defendant. The document describes Sant’Anna as a free married man of mixed race who painted maps and created perpetual lunar calendars. Over two decades before producing the Guia, Sant’Anna was already well known for his artistic and cartographic creations. The document describes him as an “official painter”, a designation suggesting that Sant’Anna was a respected professional and, by implication, an active participant in one of Salvador’s many mixed-race, Catholic brotherhoods. These religious mutual aid organizations that were a staple of Brazilian social life, many of which supported free professional artisans and craftspeople. Specifically Black Catholic brotherhoods had long served as incubators of Black agency in Brazil by purchasing freedom for the enslaved, providing social and economic aid to members, and creating pathways for social mobility and collective solidarity. Sant’Anna’s likely membership in one of these brotherhoods, though, does little to help us understand his political orientations: while directly connected to the rise of Black political consciousness through the nineteenth century, brotherhoods were diverse in their priorities and social orientations.

Attesting to the artist’s commitment to cartography, Caio Figueiredo Fernandes Adan and Iris Kantor have identified a series of unsigned early nineteenth-century manuscript maps of Brazil, which they attribute to Sant’Anna on stylistic grounds.³Caio Figueiredo Fernande Adan and Iris Kantor, A cartografia de um oficial pintor de mapas liberto: Estudo de atribuição de autoria (Bahia-Brasil, século XIX). In 8a SIAHC Siímposio Ibero americano de História de Cartografía/O mapa como elemento de ligação cultural entre a América e a Europa. Edited by Carme Montaner and Carla Lois. Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya, 2012) 120–33. Distributed at archives in Rio de Janeiro, some of these maps appear to be early studies for those found in the Guia, suggesting that the Guia was the culmination of years of study and analysis by the artist; in short, his magnum opus. Yet Sant’Anna’s decades of work in cartography prior to the Guia is striking given that he does not appear to have even been employed by the military or studied military cartography in an official capacity.

I say this because, between the mid-1700s and Brazilian independence in 1822, almost all known manuscript maps of Brazilian territories were produced in the context of military surveying expeditions. Even stranger, the Guia’s maps reproduce some of the major conventions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Portuguese military cartography: an emphasis on aerial perspective; defined captaincy borders; fastidious naming of rivers and towns; standardized representations of topographic features; and exacting scales for measuring distance. We can see at the bottom left of this map Sant’Anna precise scale for measuring distance; and if we return to the cover page of the Guia, at bottom right, we see his detailed guide for interpreting the symbols and designs on his maps.

These conventions originally emerged from eighteenth-century Portuguese military training reforms that prioritized cartographic training alongside scientific precision and technical uniformity. These military and cartographic reforms went together with desires in Lisbon to increase control over what it viewed as colonial hinterlands. Imperial reforms instituted in the second half of the eighteenth century utilized military cartography as a tool of colonial authority, conducting surveys to identify and suppress rebellious Indigenous and maroon communities while also assimilating inland territories and Indigenous peoples into direct Portuguese territorial control.

Given his lack of military background, Sant’Anna’s work in cartography prompts two questions. One is factual: how did Sant’Anna access the knowledge and military maps necessary to produce the Guia? Other scholars have productively suggested that the Bahia Public Library in Salvador may have provided Sant’Anna access to a range of manuscripts and printed maps on which to base his designs, especially since the library received a large donation of maps in 1812. Sant’Anna also would have had access to the Bahia Military Academy, where interested laymen like him could attend classes on military cartography.

But my hopefully informed speculation on the question of Sant’Anna’s access to military cartography does not answer the second question: why was he interested in mapmaking at all? One clue comes from the Guia’s long opening text, where Sant’Anna describes the Guia as a correction for the “many errors that are found in some imprecise Maps of the interior” of Brazil, by which he means military manuscript maps. Sant’Anna claims the Guia corrects the names of rivers; presents the proper names for towns and settlements; and establishes formerly erroneous latitudinal and longitudinal lines.

However, naming practices are never neutral. Sant’Anna’s Guia throughout makes “a point of giving Indigenous names to places, rivers and cities.” Sant’Anna’s reliance on Indigenous place names does not necessarily signal his investment in a kind of contemporary anti-colonial politics. Rather, I forward that it may reflect the complex and shifting implications of the ongoing Indigenous presence in Brazilian history, one which could be antagonistic to or supportive of colonial projects.

Sant’Anna’s effort to correct the “errors” of contemporary cartography begins not with maps, but with an unprecedented watercolor painting on the bottom left of the Guia’s title page.

The image depicts an encounter at “Jiquitaia”, described by Sant’Anna as a beach in Salvador formerly known as a thriving commerce center for the area’s Tupi population, the primary Indigenous group of Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Though, in 1817, Jiquitaia was home to a newly-constructed Portuguese military fort —one that still utilized the beach’s Tupi name and so shows the Portuguese imperial appropriation of Indigenous landscapes—Sant’Anna envisions Jiquitaia as a place of ethnic egalitarianism and relative peace. Sant’Anna’s painting presents a group of white European men—identified by their skin tone and their dress—trading weapons, alcohol, and other objects on the beach. Tupi persons, depicted by Sant’Anna with feathered headdresses and skirts, interact on equal footing, as do persons of African descent. The two Black women he depicts appear to be in relationships with Indigenous men; one at left holds their child. In the foreground, a man with skin tone matching the white Europeans emerges with an Indigenous woman from behind a banana tree. His red cap and feathered skirt suggest he has long lived in the area’s Tupi communities.

As the figures on the beach point to trade goods with looks of curiosity and contemplation, and as they wear clothing contemporary to the sixteenth century, the watercolor evokes a sense of initial encounter, as if the Europeans are arriving at Jiquitaia for the first time. Sant’Anna’s title for the painting furthers this reading. “Kirimurê: Ancient Gentilic name of Bahia, and place where the City of Salvador was founded”, references the beginnings of Bahian history while also emphasizing the area’s Tupi name. However, further details complicate this initial timeline. Most obvious is the figure at bottom left, wearing a large feathered headdress, which has been identified as Catarina Paraguaçu, a sixteenth-century “Tupi indigenous woman from Bahia, who was offered by her father, the chief Taparica, to the Portuguese castaway Diogo Álvares, known as Caramuru”, an identification supported by the white figure accompanying her. In turn, Sant’Anna presents Black residents in Kirimurê and shows them as full members of Tupi worlds, even though no enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil prior to the mid-sixteenth century, after the “founding” of Salvador the title references. By including persons of African descent and Indigenous names in the scene at Jiquitaia, Sant’Anna does more than forward a vision of Brazil’s multiethnic history that would soon be enshrined in the 1824 Constitution. He also argues that Bahia’s “founding” is, perhaps, inextricable from the ways Black, European, and Indigenous worlds commingled and co-evolved in Brazil, independent of the histories of exploitative labor and land dispossession that characterized the late colonial and postcolonial imperial periods.

From a contemporary vantage point, this scene of egalitarian encounter appears like an apology or erasure of colonization’s violence. However, looking to the possible inspirations for Sant’Anna’s painting, critical distinctions emerge that show the force of his vision. The painting’s wide-angle landscape view, receding into a bay and framed with Brazilian flora, suggests Sant’Anna’s familiarity with longer histories of Dutch painting used to naturalize and aestheticize Brazilian landscapes and histories of forced labor.

A 1649 painting by the Dutch artist Frans Post testifies to the role of Dutch landscape painting in aestheticizing enslaved labor in colonial Brazil. A wide view looks back to rolling hills punctuated with lakes and rivers. Industrialized sugar mills sit atop the hills at right, while enslaved people work a bit of cleared land at center. Post renders the centrality of industrialized slavery to Dutch Brazil as a natural, aesthetic inheritance of the Brazilian landscape. A small anteater traipses in the foreground, just in front of a prominent pineapple, while a tall palm tree at right – displaying ripe palm fruits dangling from the top—frames the image.

Sant’Anna’s artistic choices (see “Kirimurê” watercolor) suggest a throughline between colonially cultivated visions of tropical, edenic labor and Sant’Anna’s own painting. The foreground pineapple appears once again, as does the framing palm tree, alongside further floral additions like cashew fruits and a banana tree. However, unlike Post, Sant’Anna puts human action squarely in the foreground and emphasizes barter and economic exchange over attempts to aestheticize forced labor. Sant’Anna’s quite literal foregrounding of the word “Jiquitaia” may reinforce the point: the beach’s name is the Tupi word for the powdered form of a chili pepper native to the Americas. Highly desired by the Portuguese who purchased it from Tupi merchants, the chili was soon exported through Portuguese trade routes into Iberia and Africa. By the early seventeenth century, people across the Atlantic world instead called this chili malagueta after an unrelated but equally prized West African spice. Culturally and etymologically, Sant’Anna’s use of “Jiquitaia” harkens less to a pre-contact image of Tupi history than a wide-ranging reference to the co-evolution of Indigenous, African, and European knowledge in and through Atlantic commerce. Fittingly, Sant’Anna does not restrict Black and Indigenous figures to laborers or workers for an invisible white elite—in which the value of their lives would be restricted to their bodily production—nor, in turn, are they portrayed as being in awe of, or saved by, white settlers in the common trope of European saviorism that would run through Brazilian history paintings later in the nineteenth century. Instead, the beach scene places economic and cultural agency in the bodies and minds of Afro-Indigenous histories, while also disentangling sartorial practice and cultural identity from skin tone.

In this way, I read “Kirimurê” as Sant’Anna’s early effort to work through what the Black and Native Studies theorist Sandra Harvey outlines as a key problem in later twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black intellectual history and politics: how articulations of Black identities are often framed around what she frames as “an existential pull … that renders Black existence, especially but not solely outside of Africa, permanently and always already ‘unrooted’”. The counterpoint to that sense of displacement, Harvey notes, is often “the Western nation-state”.⁴Sandra Harvey, "Unsettling Diasporas: Blackness and the Spectre of Indigeneity," Postmodern Culture, 31: 1, 2 (2020, 2021).) Faced with a tension between Blackness’ uprooting and the patriotic cartography of Brazilian nationhood, Sant’Anna created a painting that refused to place Blackness in opposition to Indigeneity, a point underscored by the inclusion of the Afro-Indigenous child in the scene at Jiquitaia. As I detail below, he constructs a vision of Bahia’s founding that roots Blackness and even African botanicals as Indigenous. And through the presentation of Caramuru, the castaway, he refuses to let whiteness claim the political project of the nation-state, instead showing it as an equal inheritor of diaspora, Indigenization, and forced acculturation.

This vision of the co-constituted Indigeneity of Tupi and Black worlds Sant’Anna presents as constitutive of Brazil may be reinforced in the botanicals he depicts. Cashew fruits, at left (see “Kirimurê” watercolor painting), are native to Brazil, but bananas and pineapples—two fruits that Sant’Anna positions as native in this retelling of Bahia’s founding—were transported to Brazil from West Africa in the sixteenth century. While Frans Post’s mid-seventeenth-century painting participates in a longer colonial strategy of cultivating visions of botanical hybridity to aestheticize and naturalize the violence of settler colonialism, Sant’Anna reframes foreign transplants—which include human beings and cultivated plants—as altogether native to Bahia. This is what separates Frans Post from Sant’Anna: the latter asserts the antiquity of Indigenous and African shared knowledges and harkens to a diverse, vibrant world that includes them both, independent of histories of European domination. However, complicating this reading is another background detail showing how Sant’Anna continues to play with timelines: a battle scene likely referring to the 1625 joint Spanish–Portuguese reconquest of Salvador following its Dutch occupation. Perhaps Sant’Anna is collapsing the major events of Bahia’s history here, but it also speaks to the proto-nationalist tone of his Guia by re-envisioning the moment when Bahia was brought back under Portuguese imperial sovereignty, a point that may have carried strong weight as Brazil served as temporary home to the Portuguese Crown.

Why might Sant’Anna be asserting this vision of Afro-Indigenous antiquity and Brazilian national and imperial pride all at once? What motivated his project to imagine the political contours of Blackness outside of a diasporic framing?

Sant’Anna’s self-description on the cover page as a “painter” as well as an “old pardo” may reveal much about his intent. Pardo, a Portuguese word which has no translation into English, is the general term still preferred by multiracial Brazilians to describe themselves. In the early nineteenth century, pardo indicated a person’s African—and potentially also Indigenous—ancestry, but also more generally referred to someone who was neither white (branco) nor Black (preto), with the latter term typically suggesting enslaved status. As was true throughout colonial-era and early imperial Brazil, vocabularies and self-definitions of color were often “more to indicate social positions than referring specifically to an individual’s nature.” In this sense, pardo was often equivalent to mulato—another term referring to multiracial ancestry—but mulato carried stronger pejorative connotations. Sant’Anna’s upbringing in the second half of the eighteenth century took place around what the historian Miguel A. Valerio outlines as a “popular notion that mixed-race Afro-Brazilians constituted colonial Brazil’s most deviant and unruly socioracial group.” In this context, Valerio elaborates, those who could often expressed a “preference for the term pardo instead of the sullied one of mulato, [which was] popularly associated with licentiousness and ungovernability.”⁵Miguel A. Valerio, "The pardos’ triumph: The use of festival material culture for socioracial promotion in eighteenth-century Pernambuco," Journal of Festive Studies 3:49, 2021.

Sant’Anna’s self-definition may be related to his artistic prowess. Pardo artists in late colonial Brazil had greater access to artistic work and exploration and so could pursue opportunities unavailable to darker-skinned Brazilians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, Sant’Anna may also have been invested in showing the role of pardos in the formation and participation of a nascent Brazilian national identity, as well as negotiating their political position in the midst of the movement of the Portuguese court and the African rebellions at the time he created the Guia. Sant’Anna’s sole reference to racial categories in the Guia is telling in this regard.

The Guia’s fifth map,depicting the captaincy of Mato Grosso in central Brazil, contains an intriguing detail along the bottom edge. Here, Sant’Anna relays the story of Tomás da Natividade, a pardo man, who was made a salaried infantry captain by the governor.

Why would Sant’Anna have gone out of his way to relay this little-known story? Did Sant’Anna delineate Natividade’s race as pardo—same as the artist—as a testament to his social position, either by status or by aspiration, to prove pardos’ participation in the construction and maintenance of the Brazilian state? Did Sant’Anna also testify to the position of pardos in a social context where they routinely faced barriers in compensation for their service in colonial conflicts? Intriguingly, Sant’Anna may have known pardos in Bahia as both artisans like him and militia members: at the time he completed the Guia, 60% of Salvador’s fourth militia regiment, which was reserved for mixed-race Brazilians like Sant’Anna, were employed as artists. Three were painters. But all likely held far less wealth than their white counterparts in the second regiment. While mixed-race Brazilians were common in Portuguese militia ranks, as were Indigenous Brazilians, their racial status posed frequent barriers to earning full salaries and land rights. And finally, might the reference to Natividade here remind the Guia’s readers of the political differences between Africans and Brazilian-born creoles like Sant’Anna, none of whom participated in the Bahia rebellions, and indeed, were likely among the militiamen who suppressed an African-led uprising near Salvador in 1816, just as Sant’Anna began work on the Guia?

Small details like this begin to put the viewer on notice of the multiple, overlapping political interventions in Sant’Anna’s work. This continues in the first manuscript map of the Guia: a planisphere of the Americas.

As art historian Tatiana Reinoza has outlined, the planisphere was deployed as a technology of what she calls the “Western cartographic gaze” and a proxy for territorial conquest and racial hierarchization reproduced on countless travelogues and cartography manuals dedicated to the colonization of the Americas, as we see in this 1703 frontispiece.⁶Tatiana Reinoza,  Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023): 18. Yet here, the map’s cartouche at bottom center—typically the domain of colonialist fantasies about Americas as an unpopulated territory prepared for the wide implantation of European settlements, or the deployment of figures that confine and define Indigenous and Black labor—instead emphasizes Indigenous empires. Sant’Anna’s text notes the “city of Mexico” and the “city of Cusco”, capitals of the Aztec and Inca states, respectively, their first and last rulers, and those rulers’ undoing by the Spanish in 1521 and 1533. Again, Sant’Anna not only highlights the antiquity of Indigenous civilizations here, but even asserts a new theory of the peopling of the Americas: Sant’Anna titles his map as actually identifying the “parts” from which those who populated the Americas came: “if from Asia, as various authors write, see the parts of China, Japan, and Tartary …and those who came from … Europe and Africa”. Sant’Anna collapses the entire history of the Americas’ peopling, putting all histories of forced and voluntary migration on equal footing while, importantly, decentering Europe spatially and discursively.

Sant’Anna’s map of Brazil, second in the Guia, further suggests his inspiration from much earlier works. Most maps of Brazil at this period were oriented with north at the top, while also outlining the Atlantic coastline and fleshing out the country’s interior: moves reflective of a kind of cartographic proto-nationalism that sought to form Brazil into an identifiable territorial boundary prior to independence in 1822. Such maps helped to render the nation as what the historian Sumathi Ramaswamy calls a “geo-body” necessary for would-be citizens to “see” the country politically and, in turn, to socially attach themselves to it.⁷Sumathi Ramaswamy, 2014. Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India. In Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 420.This scheme was then reproduced on a global range of engraved and teaching maps after Brazilian independence, such as this example produced in Philadelphia in 1818 (below, left).

Sant’Anna’s Brazil breaks from this schema, orienting west at the top, a change that neither formed part of Sant’Anna’s corrective efforts nor would have been reproduced in any contemporary work. This style harkens to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, where European—especially Dutch—colonial cartographers commonly oriented Brazil with west at the top, such as in the 1644 example (above, right), which became the basis for nearly a century’s worth of maps in its wake. Also note here that this map contains a prominent inset, at top, depicting the bay of the city of Salvador, and so further speaks to Sant’Anna’s Bahia-centrism.

Sant’Anna’s Brazil also reduces the size of the Atlantic Ocean so that the west African coast peeks through the bottom right. This required shifting of the spatial dynamics from the planisphere the map before, suggesting the move is intentional. This style of showing the tip of Africa with Brazil emerged in the 1500s. Common through the middle of the eighteenth century, this style emphasized Brazil and Africa’s proximity to imply the facility of trafficking humans and goods between them.

In some cases, the link was explicit: the frontispiece to French trader Jean Barbot’s 1688 travelogue concerning his time in West Africa depicts the ocean as a connector between Brazil and West Africa, while two Black figures—aesthetic, celebratory archetypes of the slave trade—flank it. Yet this singular framing of Brazil and West Africa had effectively disappeared by the early nineteenth century. Is Sant’Anna here continuing to extol the slave trade as the backbone of Brazil’s economy—potentially a point that could further distance his racial subjectivity from associations with slave status? Might he also be subtly referencing Brazil’s strong African presence, something further suggested by the oversize importance given to Africa in the planisphere, where the continent almost dominates a map purportedly focused on the Americas? And if so, how does this detail operate in tension with the scene at Jiquitaia, which effectively refuses an image of Blackness tied to Atlantic slavery or diasporic African origins?

Sant’Anna’s eighth map, which depicts northeastern Brazil, may further testify to his work’s historical references and the multilayered histories of diaspora that inform it. Again, shifting typical orientation conventions by depicting northeastern Brazil with south at the top – he loves playing with perspective and directionality – Sant’Anna includes a critical detail: at the bottom of the map, he paints a small black building and labels it “Tapera de Angola; or Palmares.”

Palmares is the common name for a collection of maroon polities that existed in this region during most of the seventeenth century. At its height, Palmares had a population of many thousands, and was politically powerful enough that it conducted major conflicts and signed treaties with the Portuguese and the Dutch. Yet Palmares’ assumed destruction in 1695 means that it was an atypical location to be referenced on a map of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, only one other known map from Brazil’s entire colonial period—a map of this same region commissioned in 1766—names Palmares.

Moreover, the Guia’s pairing of “Tapera de Angola” and “Palmares” is unique in the history of cartography. The name “Tapera de Angola” only appears on one other known map: at the far bottom right of Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu’s oft-reproduced 1662 map of northeastern Brazil, depicting the region’s occupation by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century. Sant’Anna’s use of this phrasing suggests he used Blaeu’s map specifically as a source of inspiration, nearly a century-and-a-half after its production (and in turn further supports the idea that Sant’Anna is taking broad inspiration from seventeenth-century Dutch Brazilian visual culture).

Naming Palmares in this way may have carried special resonance for Sant’Anna’s evocation of Brazil’s constitutive Afro-Indigeneity. On one level, “Tapera de Angola, or Palmares,” brings into intimate relation phonemes from three languages: “tapera”, an Indigenous Tupi word referring to a ruined or destroyed settlement; “Angola”, the central African polity strongly associated with Palmares, and the region commonly cited as its cultural and philosophical origin point; and “Palmares”, the Portuguese term for palm trees. Sant’Anna uniquely intermingles these sounds on the map, as if linguistically reproducing the kind of multiracial egalitarianism painted on the Guias’s frontispiece. Beyond the multivocality Sant’Anna’s naming provides, we cannot know how Sant’Anna understood the words’ meaning. Did he know, for example, that “tapera” referred to an abandoned settlement? What might this have meant for his evocation of “Angola” and the suggestion that this African polity, or at least its memory, existed or was even at home in Brazil—yet another iteration of the continent’s vibrant proximity to, and co-constitution of, the Brazilian state? If Sant’Anna did understand Palmares as abandoned or destroyed, what might he suggest by re-naming it here and connoting the potential for regeneration and new settlements in the area, maroon and colonial alike, long after Palmares’s destruction? And finally, how might we put this point in conversation with Sant’Anna’s insistence that previous cartographers had made “imprecise” maps of the interior of the state? Why did he make a specific choice to emphasize this historic terminology, and thus bring into sharp relief the coeval histories of Black, Indigenous, and white European diasporas? As elsewhere, Sant’Anna’s work provides few clear answers. Yet, perhaps it is precisely his emphasis on multilayered, multi-referential ambiguity, and the strategic intermingling of colonial, Black, and Indigenous epistemologies that provides the Guia its force.

I want to conclude with the words of geographer Chérie N. Rivers, who writes that “To explain [one’s] origins in relation to a modern political map is to accept a specific construction of space and time that imprisons [oneself] in the geography of global power.”⁸Chérie N. Rivers, To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022) 31. For Rivers, the line drawing and mapmaking of longstanding colonial relations presumes a geographic and spatial fixity that attempts to force racial subjectivity into a kind of essentialized boundedness and, in so doing concretize its utility for political and economic exploitation. Anastácio de Sant’Anna worked in the wake of cartographic projects of the colonial Americas which resonate deeply with Rivers’ argument about attempts made to codify and subdue racial identities in the service of proto-nationalist imaginaries, slavery economies, and military conquests. Yet, as “real” maps attempted to instantiate racial hierarchy, practices of Black fugitivity and independence threw them into ontological crisis. As outlined at the beginning of this essay, the work of theorists of Black Geographies show the consistent inadequacy of maps produced in the service of colonial projects, either by intentionally obscuring forms of resistance embedded in the very landscapes they represented, or by failing to incorporate—as a function of their medium—the manifold processes by which those in diaspora exist and move in and remember the world.

In its foregrounding of Black and Indigenous histories and placenames, in its evocations of Africa’s proximity to Brazil, and in its presentations of Blackness’ Indigeneity to Bahia, we might see in Sant’Anna’s Guia an effort to visualize those very forms of place- and space-making obscured by colonial military cartography; to, in other words, re-map and re-animate Black and Indigenous lives beyond the confines of the modern political map. The Guia explores and disentangles the historical timelines, diasporic histories, and racial imaginaries that pushed its maker to occupy a subjective position in the racial strata of the Portuguese Empire and the nascent Brazilian state. In this way, perhaps the Guia functions less as a political statement than as Sant’Anna’s attempt to work through the contours of a racial and political schema that asked him to choose between his mixed-race ancestry and his patriotism, or between his Blackness and his rootedness in and patriotism to Bahia. The Guia interrogates the extent to which cartography may not erase, but rather could foreground, a vision of Black history as part of the state’s geo-body. The Guia may not signify “an outright rejection of the colonial geographic and cartographic project as much as an underscoring of its inadequacy”, which might “distinguish patriotic art’s investment in the map form from the state’s command mapmaking ventures.” Through his genre-bending experimentations across painting and cartography, Sant’Anna attempted to rethink the genealogy of cartography in his homeland, all while asserting his—and other pardos’—sense of belonging and centrality to it.

About the Author

Matthew Francis Rarey is associate professor and chair of the Department of Art History at Oberlin College. He is author of Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). This Southern Spaces presentation is derived from an essay published by Professor Rarey in Arts in 2024, available here.

An Excerpt from the Introduction

Throughout the nineteenth century, aided by railroads and steam tech­nologies, industrial plantations expanded their footprint into ever new territories across Latin America. The timing was unique: the process occurred right as enslavement, the foundation of these enterprises, was being subjected to unprecedented challenges—from proliferating slave insurgencies to vocal liberal-abolitionist mobilization. But along indus­trial plantations' margins, vast and socially vibrant free rural commu­nities of African descent made homes for themselves against many odds. Unearthing their worlds sheds light on a distinct history of emancipation that did not fully align with liberalism's trajectory, pushing us to move away from the teleological notion that modern political behaviors within Latin America were variations on their European or North American counterparts.

Across Latin America, Afro-descendant peasants took manifold paths to reach rural worlds of freedom. Some were fugitives from plantation slavery. Others had purchased their freedom in cash or through some form of service-based payments. In places like Santiago, the far eastern province of the Spanish colony of Cuba—the region which this book focuses on—many were only partially free. They had paid a portion of the price for their manumission while continuing to do some work for enslavers. Many of the free people of African descent in these kinds of communities formed families with poor white peasants living nearby. In spite of their differences and internal hierarchies, most such peasantries contended with the same looming threat: ever-expanding planter power and aspirations. As they creatively withstood or moved out of the plantations' way, they opened up and cultivated new land in forest thickets, occupying rugged landscapes traversed by unkempt dirt roads, far from major commercial centers. They bartered and sold the surplus they made in small regional markets and, on occasion, also purchased enslaved people. Their lives were not circumscribed by the plantation's logics, nor by a rigid Black/white divide, even though they contended with both of these forces.

Throughout the nineteenth century, industrial sugar production in Cuba remained centered in the west-central parts of the island, leaving Santiago, home to some relatively small and economically anemic coffee plantations, in a sort of marginal space. Santiago was close enough to be subjected to some of the same policies as the plantation-dominated regions, but far enough to escape many of the socioracial logics that defined sugar plantation communities. These kinds of peripheral commu­nities of free people of African descent, living in the shadows of the plantation (or other regimes of intense slavery-based extraction), could be found, beyond eastern Cuba, throughout Latin America, including rural parts of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, parts of Brazilian Amazonia, and peripheries of the coffee belt in the Brazilian southeast.¹Anne Eller, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018); Oscar de la Torre, The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Rosa Carasquillo, Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1880–1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), chapter 1; Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe, eds., Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Hebe Maria Mattos, Das cores do silêncio: os significados da liberdade no sudeste escravista, Brasil século XIX, 3rd ed. (Campinas, Brazil, 2013 [1995]). For work that shows how access to legal process could be limited in some such areas, see Yesenia Barragan, Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) and "Commerce in Children: Slavery, Gradual Emancipation, and the Free Womb Trade in Colombia," The Americas 78.2 (2021): 229–257. Historians have used the notion of "the peasant breach" to capture the emergence of a class of free rural cultivators out of slavery with relatively ambiguous land ownership rights. This book builds and expands on this work by focusing on the legal dynamics within such peasant communities. Among others, Ciro Flamarion Cardoso, "The Peasant Breach in the Slave System: New Developments in Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review 25.1 (1988): 49–57; Flavio dos Santos Gomes and João José Reis, eds., Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2016); Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1974), part II, 180–213, and "Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries," Historical Reflections 6 (1979): 213–242; Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, eds., The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London: Routledge, 2016 [1995]); Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), chapters 2 and 3; David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), chapter 5. On the United States and with a focus on legal consciousness as well, Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Looking at a community such as Santiago shows that the plantation was not the only space that defined the Black experience in the Americas. It also helps bring to light other homes for Black freedom beyond well-studied Atlantic port cities.²On Cuba as an island with two histories, one around plantations and another one, beyond, Juan Pérez de la Riva, El barracón: esclavitud y capitalismo en Cuba (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1978), 169–179. This model, however, assumes that there was only one alternative to sugar—one based on livestock production. On a region of Cuba centered on tobacco, in Vuelta Abajo, see William A. Morgan, "Opportunities and Boundaries for Slave Family Formation: Tobacco Labor and Demography in Pinar del Río, Cuba, 1817–1886," CLAR 29.1 (2020): 139–160. A reflexive piece that considers how sugar's ascent has shaped history writing within Cuba, with most categories of analysis emerging out of the study of sugar plantations, is Alejandro de la Fuente, "Apuntes sobre la historiografía de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI cubano," Santiago 71 (1988): 59–118. On the importance of local/regional history and on the impossibility of subsuming Santiago's trajectory to that of sugar planting and of Havana, see Julio LeRiverend, "De la historia provincial y local en sus relaciones con la historia general de Cuba," Santiago 46 (1982): 121–136. The historiography on urban free populations of color is vast. A sample that captures the breadth of this field appears in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Whitney Nell Stuart and John Garrison Marks, eds., Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); special issue "Urban Slavery in the Age of Abolition," ed. Karwan Fatah-Black, IRSH 65 (2020). The inner workings of such rural worlds during the nineteenth century also suggest that attention to liberal abolitionism, nation-centered emancipation and citizenship struggles, or Atlantic aboli­tionist circulations leaves out another, perhaps less spectacular history of freedom whose protagonists were families, women, and children of African descent who stayed in place and forged locally focused communities. In these corners of Latin America, the nineteenth century was a time of freedom through custom. Here, people operated in a locally grounded legal sphere that consisted of orally negotiated rights, obligations, and social expectations that had the thinnest foundations in written (positive) law. Custom belonged to community justice; its versatility blurred the boundar­ies between formal and informal law, between legal experts and ordinary litigants, between courts, the governor's office, and hamlets tucked away in forest thickets in the interior. Its logics defied the notion that individuals were entitled to certain rights for life and could carry them across contexts. Instead, within custom-dominated worlds, legal prerogatives were distrib­uted with an eye to local political hierarchies, economic conditions, and reputations. They could be suspended and reassigned.

In the Age of Emancipation, in places like Santiago, free or semi-free Afro-descendant peasantries led a political revolution through custom-centered community justice that remained barely visible to the authorities at the time and, in the long term, even to historians. These peasants did not rely primarily on liberal ideologies of universal freedom, individual autonomy, or notions of inclusive citizenship within national republics, even though on occasion they did invoke them. They did not wait for liberal-nationalist elites to form coalitions with them and to decree freedom from above. Instead, inside courts of law, they usually sought relief in the custom-centered colonial legal frame­work. In Santiago, these popular legal practices began as far back as the sixteenth century, but became especially active during the nineteenth century, when, for a range of political and economic reasons, manumission rates increased. Day in and day out, enslaved people chipped away at enslavers' authority locally, by negotiating the terms of their manumission and land access. They pulled one another out of plantation slavery gradually, yet consistently, forging communities whose members also played an important role inside courts of law as witnesses, advocates, or bystanders when conflicts arose. Within rural spaces like Santiago that were marked by relative under­development, Afro-descendant peasants creatively defined manumission-based freedoms piece by piece through mundane social practices that had little grounding in positive law, were orally negotiated, and were recognized by local governors and courts of justice. These freedoms were patchwork, often incomplete when measured against liberal-abolitionist yardsticks, pre­carious, and even reversible. Yet they were very concrete, and in the long term, they served to corrode the legal structures of plantation slavery locally.

In Santiago's musty rooms and busy antechambers, as elsewhere in Latin America, magistrates and litigants puzzled out enslaved people's rights of access to autonomy, property, and family, case by case. Would a woman who had purchased her freedom while pregnant give birth to an enslaved or to a free child? Could enslaved people who had paid half the price of their freedom spend the night with kin living on other properties? To whom did a pig truly belong, the enslaver on whose estate it roamed, or the enslaved who had purchased it with her savings and had tended to it? Could enslaved and free people of color occupy fallow land inside private estates? In Santiago, such claims were not apparently too small to be assessed and extensively documented by local scribes, notaries, and other legal officers. The freedom that such adjudications yielded had a plurality of meanings, some of them contradictory and akin to subordination and dependence. Scholars of the early modern Atlantic world have shown that vernacular understandings of freedom were highly diverse in social prac­tice, going beyond abstract written definitions embedded in legislation.³On manumission-based Black freedom, among others, Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri Snyder, eds., As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Mariana Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (London: Palgrave, 2008); Mariana Dantas and Douglas Libby, "Families, Manumission, and Freed People in Urban Minas Gerais in the Era of Atlantic Abolitionism," IRSH 65 (2020): 117–144; Erika Denise Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020); Zephyr Frank, Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Oilda Hevia Lanier and Daisy Rubiera Castillo, Emergiendo del silencio: mujeres negras en la historia de Cuba (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2016); Lyman Johnson, "Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810," HAHR (1979): 258–279; Michelle McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, h600–h700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Aisnara Perera and María de los Angeles Meriño Fuentes, Para librarse de lazos, antes buena familia que buenos brazos: apuntes sobre la manumisión en Cuba (Santiago: Editorial Oriente, 2009). Beyond the Iberian Atlantic, among others, Randy Sparks and Rosemary Brana-Shute, eds., Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Judith Shafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003) Within Spanish America, such pluralism did not operate in parallel or at odds with the law; it was part of custom and as such ensconced in the law.⁴Scholars of law and slavery in American slave societies have emphasized the importance of considering law broadly, beyond the written, to include litigation and petitioning of higher authorities. Such an approach makes visible the participation of subaltern groups in the legal system as well as the plurality of their understandings of law and freedom. This literature is vast. Among others, focusing on Latin America, Manuel Barcia, "'Fighting with the Enemy's Weapons: The Usage of the Colonial Legal Framework by Nineteenth-Century Cuban Slaves,'" Atlantic Studies 3.2 (2006): 159–181; Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Sherwin Bryant, "Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito," CLAR 13 (2004): 7–46; Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Keila Grinberg, "Freedom Suits and Civil Law in Brazil and the United States," Slavery & Abolition 22.3 (2001): 66–82; Chloe Ireton, "Black Africans and Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire," Renaissance Quarterly 73 (2020): 1–43; McKinley, Fractional Freedoms; Brian Owensby, "How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom: Litigation and Liberty in Seventeenth-Century Mexico," HAHR 85 (2005): 39–79; Aisnara Perera Díaz and María de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, Estrategias de libertad: un acercamiento a las acciones legales de los esclavos en Cuba (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2015), 2 vols.; Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Frank Proctor III, "Damned Notions of Liberty": Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011); Rebecca Scott and Carlos Venegas, "María Coleta and the Capuchin Friar: Slavery, Salvation, and the Adjudication of Status," WMQ 76.4 (2019): 727–762; Aurora Vergara Figueroa and Carmen Luz Cosme, Demando mi libertad: mujeres negras y sus estrategias de resistencia en la Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Cuba, 1700–1800 (Cali, Colombia: Editorial Universidad Icesi, 2018). Beyond Latin America, Mariana Candido, "African Freedom Suits and Portuguese Vassal Status: Legal Mechanisms for Fighting Enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830," Slavery & Abolition 32.3 (2011): 447–459; Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter 3; Ariela Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Kimberly Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Historians have explored the role of community justice before the rise of modern legal systems, emphasizing local variations, the role of vernacular under­standings of justice, and of social and kinship relations associated with personal reputa­tion. Among others, Tommaso Astarita, Village Justice: Community, Family, and Popular Culture in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Laura Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotion, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

That custom could hold any emancipatory power is by many measures surprising. Within the Spanish colonial tradition, uso y costumbres ("usage and customs") had historically referred to continuity and trad­ition. This meant that locally negotiated values enabled a population divided by the hierarchies of birth status to coalesce around a tenuous legal-cultural consensus, known as "the peace." For centuries, jurists and state-makers across the Iberian Atlantic had relied on custom to prevent challenges to entrenched hierarchies or, in early modern juridical lan­guage, to keep "the peace" ("buen gobierno," "la paz").⁵Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, El poder de la costumbre: estudios sobre el derecho consuetudi-nario en América hispana hasta la emancipación (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia de Derecho, 2001).

Birth right status structured the distribution of legislated rights in colonial Latin America; certain lineages who controlled power locally could also shape access to customary rights for all. But beyond the imperative of birth status protections, the law also had to manage conflict, which local authorities usually did through custom. State institutions could temper local elites' powers in the name of "the peace."⁶Other scholars of law and slavery who have pointed out how enslaved people maneuvered prudence-based legal systems beyond the Iberian Atlantic are Edwards, The People and Their Peace; Malik Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Edward Ruggemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). In Santiago, enslaved people invoked the specter of marronage (the action of fleeing slavery) and insurrection to get their way with local institutions and elites and shape law-making; the distinction between the judicial and extra-judicial was therefore not so clear-cut. As one enslaver remarked, enslaved people were more likely to file freedom suits when fears of marronage were rampant among planters.⁷ANC, ASC, leg. 582, exp. 13,348, "El Síndico Procurador reclama la libertad de la esclava Gertrudis de Madame Fillet Barberousse, 1833." Whether or not the assess­ment was accurate, it nevertheless suggests that some people with power saw a connection between these two avenues toward freedom. As a result of these related tactics, whether their connections were real or imagined, subaltern sectors of society might be circumstantially permitted to occupy land on privately owned estates. Enslaved people might be granted time off to tend to a vegetable garden, or they might be permitted to purchase their freedom in installments or conditionally, including in return for certain services. To judges' and governors' minds, such equity-based rulings placated the poor and maximized their political utility, since they could then be mobilized as vassals.⁸ On casuistic (case-by-case) decision-making as a form of equity-based judgment, Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de Joaquín Ibarra, 1791 [1680]), Libro II, Titl. I, Law XXIV, 1:223; Códigos Españoles. Novísima Recopilación de las Leyes de España, Libro III, Tit. IV, Law IV (Madrid: Imprenta de la Publicidad, 1850), 2:16. Also, Antonio Manuel Hespanha, Poder e instituçoes no antigo regime: guia de estudo (Lisbon: Cosmos, 1992), 20–35, and Como os juristas viam o mundo (Lisbon, 2015), 407–424; Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal System in Quito (h650–h750) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), chapter 3; Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial; Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, Casuismo y sistema: indagación sobre el espiritu del derecho indiano (Buenos Aires: IIHD, 1992); Jesús Vallejo, "Power Hierarchies in Medieval Juridical Thought," Ius commune 19 (1992): 1–29; Joaquín Escriche, Diccionario razonado de legislación y jurisprudencia (Madrid: Imprenta del Colegio Nacional de Sordomudos, 1838), vol. 1, under arbitrio de juez, 325, and vol. 2 (Madrid: Libreria de la Señora Viuda de D. Antonio Oleja, 1847), under equidad, 833–834; Alejandro Guzmán-Brito, Codificación del derecho civil interpretación de las leyes (Madrid: Iustel, 2011), 188–221. Enslaved people had the right to be protected against bodily harm, including hunger. Access to a vegetable garden, an equity-based right, was considered as the satisfaction of such a subsistence right. P. IV, Titl. XXI, Law VI, Los Códigos Españoles. El Código de Las Siete Partidas (Madrid: Imprenta de la Publicidad, 1850), 2:519. On legal actions and marronage as elements of a spectrum of related strategies, rather than as independent tactics, Bryant, "Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants" and Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). These kinds of subsistence rights acquired the weight of custom if exercised over a long period of time. They were more likely in areas where the local elite had a tenuous grip on power. Both Africans and Afro-descendants accessed them and fought for them through the courts, a relatively remarkable phenomenon—in light of the documented difficulty that many Africans had to access courts of law in other parts of Latin America.⁹Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, h800–h850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

The practice of allocating rights to enslaved people according to custom—a practice that had existed for hundreds of years in Santiago and elsewhere in Latin America—was not intended to be a liberating act. Indeed, its primary goal was simply to release some of the tensions inherent in birth status hierarchies and slavery, all the while promoting conformity among the enslaved. By the eighteenth century, however, in certain parts of Latin America, some such custom-based openings did hold destabilizing power. This was due to the fact that, more and more, subaltern groups began to claim customary entitlements not just in the name of need but also in the name of merit, and against a background of increasingly vocal abolitionist demands in the Atlantic world. Across Latin America, as manumission became more frequent, so did conflict and debate about its workings. When freedom litigants invoked custom, they often pointed to recently established expectations associated with relations of debt and reciprocation. These customs were less akin to tradition, and more similar to contracts—arrangements that were sup­posed to reward the parties for their respective contributions to an exchange. Contractual logics therefore became increasingly pervasive in rural Santiago as manumission rates increased. That customary relations could be contractual held politically combustible potential at a time of hemispheric liberal rhetoric emphasizing individual labor rights over fixed birth status. Without a doubt, this particular understanding of custom might have gained greater prominence inside courts of law in the nine­teenth century precisely under liberal influences.

Yet, when African and Afro-descendant peasants approached contract-like relations as custom, they also tapped into a second definition of it from within the colonial legal tradition: as an expression of "popular will" and traditions of distributing rights based on individual reputation and political utility, not just lineage.¹⁰Bianca Premo, "Custom Today: Temporality, Customary Law, and Indigenous Enlightenment," HAHR 94.3 (2014): 355–379, esp. 359; Paola Miceli, Derecho con-suetudinario y memoria: práctica jurídica y costumbre en Castilla y León (siglos XI–XIV) (Madrid: Universidad Carlos III, 2012); Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 119, 123. Though vague, the notion of a "popular will" reflected on local custom's power to metamorphose based on circumstances, to be closer to local realities than positive law, and to unmoor power distribution from birth status, lineage, and tradition.¹¹Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial. By this token, manumission and its locally specific transactional logics trig­gered, in the words of Michelle McKinley, "ripples of activity"—its legalities were not "frozen."¹²McKinley, Fractional Freedoms, 168. Such activity accelerated in the nineteenth century, butting against fixed status increasingly more.

While freedom as a liberal-abolitionist artifact and freedom as custom might have evolved in parallel and occasionally intersected, they neverthe­less did differ in important respects. The world of customary freedom had plural meanings that arose through practice: the securing of that freedom and its meanings were part of the same process. By contrast, the legal meanings of liberal freedom were far more standardized and abstract because more strictly embedded in written law or liberal manifestos. Customary freedom was also centered on families and on extended net­works of support and obligations. Freed people often remained entangled in such obligations after obtaining their manumission, in ways that limited their mobility and choices.¹³On the precarity of manumission-based freedom, Sidney Chalhoub, "The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slavery Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century)," IRSH 56.3 (2011): 405–439; Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). In areas with large free populations of color, individuals who were lateral to the enslave—enslaved relation­ship—the mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers, neighbors of the manumitted—also informed individual experiences of freedom. Dynamics and hierarch­ies internal to Afro-descendent communities formed the foundation for manumission's legalities. Belonging to such communities, rather than having autonomy, determined what rights one could acquire locally, an undoubtedly fractious process that yielded hierarchies.

The adjudication of free status (as reputation) through the community also informed popular racial thinking at a key historical moment in the history of racial ideologies in Cuba—the mid-nineteenth century. In Santiago, the peasantry used the language of color to describe free status and local hierarchies. As elsewhere, and as other scholars of Latin America have long pointed out, color status was not fixed but, rather, depended on one's actions and locally defined merits and reputation.¹⁴Ben Vinson III, "Introduction: African (Black) Diaspora History, Latin American History," The Americas 63.1 (2006): 1–18, and Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); María del Carmen Baerga, Negociaciones de sangre: dinámicas racializantes en el Puerto Rico decimonónico (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2015); Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico (1660–1720) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Víctor Goldgel Carballo, "El fantasma de la raza: simulación, caricaturas y cosméticos en la Cuba del siglo XIX," in Miradas efímeras. Cultura visual en el siglo XIX, ed. Cecilia Rodríguez Lehmann and Nathalie Buzaglo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuartopropio, 2017), 177–195; Karen Morrison, Cuba's Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), chapter 4. The point here is not to rediscover the malleability of race in Latin America. It is, rather, to unearth its politics within a specific context and to offer a method for accessing popular forms of racial thinking that did not gain expression in print culture or in elite political manifestos of the time. Indeed, it is to show that racial thinking was fundamentally entwined with manumission as a process. The state itself had allowed for some malleability of official color taxonomies prudentially. Somewhat privileged people of African descent, who had access to household depen­dents and enslaved people, questioned official Black/white distinctions in this colonial society before the rise of well-known intellectual theories of whitening or of the well-known ideology of "racial confraternity," such as José Martí's.¹⁵On nineteenth-century ideologies and practices of whitening in Latin America, George Reid Andrews, Los afroargentinos de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1989 [1980]) and Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 54–89; Dain Borges, "'Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert': Degeneration in Brazilian Thought, 1880–1940," Journal of Latin American Studies 25.2 (1993): 235–256; Erika Denise Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Winthrop Wright, Café con leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Laura Gotkowitz, ed., Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), especially Parts II and III. Some people lost association with official terms denoting Blackness in the record, all the while their African ancestry was still widely known. They did so, however, without direct knowledge of liberal-intellectual elites' theories of whitening, but rather through local reputational politics. Yet this reconceptualization of status was not so radical. The local elite peasant class still operated within the boundaries of a hierarchical system bearing slavery's imprint. Birth status mattered: Africanness and genealogical proximity to slavery (when one and one's ancestors had been manumitted) were considered a stigma. One's upward mobility depended on the acquisition of retainers, including enslaved people, and therefore on domination. These popular understandings of color status did not necessarily coalesce into a larger current. But Santiago's case proves another point that scholars of Latin America have shown: that popular racial ideologies were regionally specific, because, I argue, rooted in local legal customs of manumission.¹⁶Paulina Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics, Peru, h780–h854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

By mid-century, custom-based entitlements fueled political expect­ations, as the plantation's footprint expanded into Afro-descendant pea-santries' lands and prerogatives. Through legal reforms, planters and state officials in the Spanish Empire, like their counterparts in Brazil, moved to reduce custom's presence in the courtrooms and replace it with positive law.¹⁷Among others, Pedro Cantisano and Mariana Armond Dias Paes, "Legal Reasoning in a Slave Society (Brazil, 1860–1888)," LHR 36 (2018): 471–510; Sidney Chalhoub, "The Politics of Ambiguity: Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts, and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850–1888)," IRSH 60 (2015): 161–191; Keila Grinberg, "Slavery, Liberalism, and Civil Law: Definitions of Status and Citizenship in the Elaboration of the Brazilian Civil Code (1855–1916)," in Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, ed. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 109–130. They wrote down some customs that helped the enslaved, likely knowing that the end of the institution of slavery was in sight and that some such rights would facilitate (from their vantage point) a less conflictive transition to general emancipation. At the same time, the policy of turning custom into legislation eroded local autonomy, crucial to Afro-descendant peasant communities, while placing more control in the hands of legal experts and outside creditors who sought uniform legal contexts. Many enslaved people who had negotiated manumission with their enslavers lost ground when they needed to litigate to enforce the terms of those negotiations because judges could no longer recognize customary arrangements and rights; they had to restrict themselves to enforcing strictly the letter of positive law.

In 1868, eastern Cuba's enslaved and free people of African descent rose up in arms against the attacks on their autonomy and land access. They joined a white liberal elite that had initiated a war of independence against Spain. The Afro-descendant peasantry shaped the goals of this thirty-year-long mobilization (1868–1878, 1879–1880, 1895–1898) to include, beyond national liberation, also general emancipation and racially inclusive citizenship rights.¹⁸Carmen Barcia, Burguesía esclavista y abolición (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Bonnie A. Lucero, Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018); Emilio Roíg de Leuchsenring, La guerra libertadora cubana (Havana: Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad, 1952). Their support of general emancipa­tion had likely developed out of their earlier efforts to undermine planta­tion slavery through manumission, the court system, and the customary sphere. Some of the ideological fires driving the three Cuban wars of independence—one of the epic moments of Black liberation in the Western Hemisphere—were kindled by the sense of political entitlement to local autonomy that had emerged through regionally grounded com­munity justice and manumission.

About the Author

Adriana Chira is an assistant professor of history at Emory University. She is the author of Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Her second project, tentatively titled In the Plantations' Shadows: Black Peasants and Land Ownership by Possession in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea, 1880–1960, explores a mode of land tenure that many rural communities transitioning from slavery to freedom relied on to subsist. Patchwork Freedoms won the American Historical Association's 2023 Rawley Prize "for outstanding historical writing that explores aspects of integration of Atlantic worlds before the twentieth century.”

Modeling the Marie-Séraphique

The Marie-Séraphique

Video Permissions

Creative Commons license CC-BY-ND
To inquire about use permissions for all or part of these videos, contact Southern Spaces at seditor@emory.edu.

The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) is an online public history project hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. With grant support from the Humanities Council of South Carolina and a major award from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, LDHI launched in 2014 as a collaborative project that enables archivists, museum professionals, and scholars from various partner institutions to translate archival materials, historic landscapes and structures, and academic research into widely accessible digital exhibitions. Each LDHI exhibition includes narrative text vetted through an open peer review process with editorial contributors, and features digitized exhibition materials such as photographs, archival documents, artwork, and oral histories, as well as interactive maps and timelines. Faculty and staff from the College of Charleston Libraries play a central role in maintaining and coordinating the overall project, and graduate student assistants from the College of Charleston–Citadel Joint Graduate MA Program in History help acquire exhibition materials and lay out the projects in Omeka.

In partnership with the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW), LDHI's mission is to facilitate public history projects about underrepresented race, class, gender, and labor histories in the South Carolina Lowcountry and the interconnected Atlantic World. This inclusive approach to Lowcountry history promotes greater awareness and audience engagement with South Carolina's multicultural and multinational history, from the colonial period to the twentieth century civil rights movement.

Through this mission, LDHI currently features online exhibitions that emphasize African American history in Charleston and the Lowcountry region. The LDHI exhibition, The Charleston Hospital Workers Movement, 1968–1969, authored by Kerry Taylor from The Citadel, examines the development and aftermath of the Hospital Workers' Strike. The protestors were predominately African American women from the Medical College Hospital and the Charleston County Hospital who joined together to demonstrate against discriminatory practices and unequal pay. With support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the strike gained national attention and attracted the attention of civil rights leaders such as Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Coretta Scott King, only one year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The strikers succeeded in gaining wage increases and accelerated efforts towards desegregation and modernization in the healthcare professions in Charleston.

Exhibitions such as Voyage of the Echo: The Trials of an Illegal Trans-Atlantic Slave Ship by John Harris from Johns Hopkins University, and Nat Fuller's Feast: The Life and Legacy of an Enslaved Cook in Charleston by David Shields from the University of South Carolina and Kevin Mitchell from Trident Technical College, provide insights into the international networks and complex experiences of slavery in Charleston. After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas, developed by a collaborative team led by Brian Kelly at Queen's University Belfast, addresses the history of emancipation and the period of Reconstruction in North and South Carolina following the US Civil War. Keeper of the Gate: Philip Simmons' Ironwork in Charleston, South Carolina, produced in partnership with the Philip Simmons Foundation, Inc., reveals the cultural legacies of enslaved artisans in this city, which influenced the life and work of African American ironwork artists such as Philip Simmons in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In one of LDHI's more recent exhibitions, Millicent Brown, Jon Hale, and Clerc Cooper worked with the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center to create Somebody Had To Do It: First Children in School Desegregation. This exhibition recounts the experiences of young African American students who were the first to desegregate schools and features excerpts of oral history videos conducted by the project team, as well as an interactive map, timeline, and narrative overview. The exhibition includes a personal essay by Brown about her experiences as one of the first students to desegregate public schools in Charleston County in 1963, which initiated desegregation throughout the state nearly a decade after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

LDHI is planning new digital exhibitions and collaborations with partner institutions and scholars. In response to the shootings at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston on June 17, 2015, the LDHI team is partnering with Toni Carrier from Lowcountry Africana and Emanuel AME church leaders to develop an online memorial featuring images by various photographers. LDHI is also working with Bernard Powers from the College of Charleston on an exhibition about the history of the Emanuel AME Church, from Denmark Vesey's role in leading a major slave revolt in 1822 to Emanuel AME's participation in the modern civil rights movement. These exhibitions are connected to a series of collaborative efforts with local archivists, museum professionals, and scholars to commemorate the Emanuel shootings and promote greater awareness of African American history and contemporary struggles for racial justice.

About the Author

Mary Battle is co-director of the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative and public historian at the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. Battle received her PhD from Emory University's Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts in 2013 and worked as an editorial associate for Southern Spaces from 2007–2010.

Joan Anim-Addo: Traveling with Imoinda

This presentation raises questions primarily concerning art, authorship, and to a much lesser extent, critique, specifically in relationship to my libretto Imoinda or She Who Will Lose Her Name, written in 1997. The piece received a rehearsed reading in 1998 and was first published in 2003. Considering the art involved in this full-length work of musical theater, not only in terms of writing, but also in performance or public spectacle, I am interested to reflect upon what keeps those of us, black women especially, who find ourselves as artists woefully under-resourced in our diverse locations, nonetheless committed to developing what seems, at times, to be an impossible practice. To do this, I borrow the notion of "the thin black line" from the seminal black british visual artists' exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid in 1985. For the purpose of today's reflection, the "thin black line" resonates ideas about resistance, that, retrospectively and disturbingly evoke 1980s Britain with its indifference or hostility to that which, for this discussion, might yet be referred to as "black art."

My idea for Imoinda was to rewrite Aphra Behn's seventeenth century text, Oroonoko or the Royal Slave, as a full-length libretto central to which would be Imoinda, the hitherto silenced black woman in Behn's 1688 novella. By this means, I aimed to authorize Imoinda as an (alter)native narrative to Behn's text. Thus, like Giovanna Covi who first translated the libretto with Chiara Pedrotti, readers and indeed audiences would find that, "Imoinda … does not simply write the story back from the point of view of 'the other' female character; most importantly, it subversively revises the very reality that inspired Behn's fiction."¹See Giovanna Covi, "Oroonoko's Genderization and Creolization: Joan Anim-Addo's Imoinda," in Revisiting and Reinterpreting Aphra Behn: Proceedings of the Aphra Behn Europe Seminar ESSE Conference (Entrevaux, France: Bilingua GA Editions, 2002), 83–92. How, as a black British artist, does one go about such a project that also demands staging and the full incorporation of music and voice? It is likely that a perverse commitment is key to such an artistic vision. Yet, commitment first set me traveling with Imoinda, since the realities of under-resourcing became only too evident after the initial authorial stage, the point at which literary artists usually begin to relax.

The impact of under-resourcing that concerns black artists, particularly, becomes magnified in a project such as opera, which in the UK was subsidized in 2007 by the Arts Council to the tune of over fifty-two million pounds, compared to one and three quarter million pounds allocated for jazz, both of which boast similar audience figures in Britain. In the 1990s, black British opera was effectively non-existent, a situation that has barely altered. My desire to counter this through my writing in the 1990s also uncovered questions of authorship and interlinked notions of authority implicit in the attempt to write across boundaries of race, gender, and class, effectively positioning myself out of place as an artist. Who was I to presume to write opera or to consider that black historical engagement might interest an audience preoccupied with "culture"? To begin to historicize Imoinda as an art project and to draw some parallels with 1980s black women artists is also to acknowledge–at best–indifference, alongside a lack of infrastructural support, issues of skills and knowledge gaps, and a commensurate will "to leap our discontinuities," as Kamau Brathwaite has termed it. Much that we have begun to take for granted, for example, finding an agent, or having our work "read," was often unrealistic. The resources refused to find me, and so to achieve the realization of Imoinda fully as art, that is, beyond authorship and in performance, I would develop a push-and-travel relationship to the project, one that, fortuitously, my academic role could support.

To isolate the travel element, I offer a brief chronology that, since the traveling continues, can only be partial, even as it affords an important mapping of how such art might develop, perhaps especially if within one's transnational make-up, the identities black British and black woman are also key. Thus, the final years of the 1990s might be described as important initial "push" years of the project represented by the learning of new skills that allowed a leap of "discontinuities" into much that was unknown, as well as through a consolidating of much practiced writing skills.

Timeline

1996

Talawa Theater Women Writers' Bursary Award kick-started the writing of Imoinda

1998

A June 19 rehearsed reading followed at the Oval House Theater in London under the direction of Warren Wills

1999

An August 1 public performance directed by Juwon Ogungbe followed at the Horniman Museum, representing my 'push' to performance

Visual artist Lubaina Himid, whose "thin black line" I referenced above, writes of art as the practice of "gathering and re-using," and of the time art requires as "measurable in hours during a day certainly but also a sense of time having passed before, a sense of history and most importantly a sense of future, a knowledge of survival."²Lubaina Himid, "Fragments: An Exploration of Everyday Black Creativity and its Relationship to Political Change," Feminist Arts News Vol. 2, no. 8 (1988): 8. Imoinda might easily not have survived into the twenty-first century. I had in my naiveté undertaken an artistic project of tremendous scale without thought of funding, acquiring an agent, a business plan or any such practical consideration. More than doing art, I was claiming a public and contentious arts practice for a black woman. Moreover, I remained blind to the reality of being a nameless, uncommissioned black woman doing opera in the UK, a cultural space in which opera is considered high art for the English middle classes, meaning a more or less exclusively white clientele. Fortunately, serendipity took me to Italy where enquiry about my writing led to the translation of Imoinda and a breathing of new life and renewed optimism into the artistic project. Serena Guarracino, having interviewed me during a break in the Pan-African conference to which I was contributing at the time, wrote afterwards about the "new set of possibilities for contemporary opera" that Imoinda promised. Guarracino's assessment was that Imoinda "challenge[d] the idea of Western opera as a corpus of works whose archaeological mise en scène deprives them of any relevance for the present." Indeed, Imoinda was meant to challenge on many levels, but what was new for me in Italy was the seriousness with which academic and music specialists alike engaged with the text and its possibilities as a staged work. Guarracino noted further that "publication of Imoinda in Italy, home of opera, with an Italian translation" shook "the very ground of Italian opera as it is known in Italy and elsewhere, opening it to the challenge of voices coming from the margins of Western cultural hegemony."³Serena Guarracino, "Imoinda's Performing Bodies: An Interview with Joan Anim-Addo," in I am Black/White/Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe, eds. Joan Anim-Addo and Suzanne Scafe (Londong: Mango Publishing, 2007): 212–223.

Guarracino's point about "Western cultural hegemony," had summed up, accurately, I thought, what might be discovered at the core of the art-making that Imoinda represents. It is useful to know, for example, that the interview was conducted in the context of the conference Networking Women: Trans-European and Circum-Atlantic Connections, which took place in Florence in 2004. My own paper was entitled "Pan-Africanist Women: Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jane Rose Roberts and E.V. Kinlock as Networking Women."⁴See Giovanna Covi, Modernist Women Race Nation: Networking Women 1890–1950: Circum-Atlantic Connections (London: Mango Publishing, 2005). My research at the time concerned black women trying to articulate their freedom within the context of Pan-Africanism. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, my writing of Imoinda was not only interested in presenting challenging black women. Instead, as Guarracino notes, the project as art was itself a challenge, daring "to go to the heart of this very, idiosyncratically Western genre" and daring further, to effectively claim it as "mine," the cultural heritage of a black, first-generation immigrant woman from the Caribbean. Indeed, I dared to conceive of and articulate the operatic performance that I envisioned for Imoinda as "carnival."⁵Guarracino, "Imoinda's Performing Bodies" 212–223. In other words, my concern was with radical art-making, an almost compelling reason for the project's progress to be hampered in the UK. That itself serves as reminder that opera is not usually considered in terms of radical art and certainly not in the UK. In Italy, "home of opera," it appeared that opera lovers could afford to be more indulgent, generous even, in their embrace of someone at least proposing opera with a difference.

In addition to historicizing Imoinda as art project, I cannot escape in the course of this reflexive exercise acknowledgement of a politicizing that necessarily informs the "thin black line" of resistance to an over-determining of black identity and with it persistent attempts at directing, shaping, and limiting human potential. So, yes, it seemed right to "appropriate the name and conventions of Western opera … while hybridizing them with other forms of musical theater, such as Caribbean carnival and mas." Furthermore, Guarracino gets to the heart of my creative enterprise by acknowledging how much Imoinda itself calls for "a re-thinking of opera's role in the creation of Europe's cultural identity, while at the same time exploring how through opera the former European empire may write, or better, sing back."⁶Guarracino, "Imoinda's Performing Bodies," 212–223.

The "hybridized" or exotic version promised by Imoinda, of interest enough to composers such as Luigi Don Ciacci and opera specialists like Guarracino in Italy, made not the slightest performance ripple in the UK following the first published bi-lingual edition of the libretto in 2003. Notably, the art deployed by Imoinda was already authorizing the voices of slave women and representing explosive dynamics relative to the tension between subjugation and resistance, a relatively unpopular choice of art project in the UK.

A key change in the performance profile of Imoinda came about in 2008, persuading me to further travels after having listened to composer Glenn McClure's ideas for working with young people to develop a world premiere of Imoinda at the School of the Arts (SOTA) in Rochester, New York. Critique and travel had contributed to this moment. For the second edition of Imoinda, a portable text would be required, one that young people could easily carry around. Covi and Pedrotti's pioneering bi-lingual edition was not pocket-sized, but the 2008 second edition of Imoinda would be. As I explained in a recent interview with the young Italian scholar, Lisa Marchi, an important part of the art of Imoinda lies in the resolution I would reach between "music and affects" or the sound world of the project. Explaining my awareness of "the contrast between what the enslaved Africans were forced to leave behind – their 'vibrational practices,' in Eidshem's terms – and what they would attempt to recover in the new place of the Americas without either familiar instruments or leisure," I posed the solution of this problem as key to the sound world or musical content of the project. Indeed, the sound world was the huge artistic challenge. How to represent it?  How to reconcile audience expectations with artistic vision? How to write it down so that it communicated even to a western trained composer, if need be? I had stipulated drums throughout the text although I was only too well aware that I was "working against many operatic traditions." At the same time, not having been "commissioned" to undertake the project, "I had the complete luxury of following through on my own concerns with the affective experience."⁷Lisa Marchi, "The Transformative Potential of Imoinda: An Interview with Joan Anim-Addo," Synthesis 7 (2015):154–163. http://synthesis.enl.uoa.gr/perspectives-from-the-radical-other-7-2015.html.

Such "luxury" comes at a cost. Is the world ready for Imoinda, the full text? With the "crossing" of the Atlantic and following the luxury of performance, not driven or pushed by me, but handsomely funded by the Rockerfeller Foundation, Imoinda has more recently been subjected to some artistic compromise. The text is now increasingly spoken of and thought about in terms of a "Slavery Trilogy." With music more firmly in place, collaborative issues have become more of a concern. Is the "Slavery Trilogy" that my collaborating composer has begun to market, the same as Imoinda? How far am I prepared to compromise? How prepared am I to lose sight of the African part of the narrative, Part One, for what has become more acceptable, the tale of slavery in the Americas? Imoinda, Part Two has in the course of time metamorphosed into "The Crossing" and was first performed at Tulane University in April 2013. Part Two tells of the journey made by Oko and Imoinda on the slaveship across the Atlantic to the Americas, a theme that is attracting increasing media attention beginning with films such as Beloved and more recently and finally involving black British director Steve McQueen, Twelve Years a Slave.

In closing, I would like to share a couple of minutes of the SOTA production, one that has been very faithful to my vision. The focus on performance in this presentation has been to consider this element of theater writing as crucial to the kind of literary art that Imoinda represents and ultimately an indicator of whether this particular artwork flies at all. Critique or criticism is ultimately of no lesser importance. For those who are interested, I direct you to the Goldsmiths, University of London website that focuses on critical perspectives and published papers on Imoinda. I also encourage those interested to peruse volume seven of the online journal Synthesis titled "Perspectives of the Radical Other" that engages critically with Imoinda as written text and as performance. I offer a few final reflections on authorship and draw again on my responses to Lisa Marchi's interview.

Why did I first insist upon writing? Partly because, at a specific moment, I found myself among a privileged minority of African-Caribbean women who could assume such a responsibility, given that history and its aftermath. It was in part a political decision. I did not emerge from a middle-class cocoon destined to write and to find a privileged place in the world; far from it. So, I consider my writing to be political. Imoinda and the women of that text are speaking, thinking subjects in direct contradiction to what has been generally understood about enslaved women. They reflect an important part of what it means to be human. That humanity is not new though it has been newly allowed to speak.

The art that chooses us, I suggest, carries its own restrictions, dependent on our personal location. I have mentioned three identities that signify my own location and indicate something of the challenges of ever making art at all in Britain. Writing and, more importantly, publication in Britain still carries real challenges for those of us who are differently located in relation to the white mainstream. Those of us who place writing at the centre of our art and who are black in Britain dare to forget this at the peril of simply piling up dusty manuscripts. The challenge for black women like me, who insisted on writing and publishing in Britain in the late twentieth century, has been the challenge of claiming – despite the very real restrictions – artistic territory central to which is writing, publication, and performance when society deems such pursuits effectively off limits. To permeate boundaries that effectively dehumanize has been a crucial concern of my art. Hence the representation of speaking black subjects, the invisible ones of a dominant history, projected from page to stage, from community halls to proscenium arches and back again when art calls. Art calls again. No doubt helped by reception across the pond, "The Crossing" is due to be performed at the Actors Church in Covent Garden November, 2014. It is billed in a Festival, "The Fifth London Festival of American Music." Partly as consequence of my engagement with scale, the traveling continues, a questionable exoticism flies, though, for the moment, only when the text is seen to be traveling.

About Joan Anim-Addo

Joan Anim-Addo is professor of Caribbean literature and culture in the department of Engish and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is author of the libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (London: Mango Publishing, 2008), two poetry collections, a literary history, as well as co-founder of New Mango Season, the Journal of Caribbean Women's Studies.

Arturo Lindsay: Erasing Erasure and Other Ways of Seeing

To see is to know. But how can we know the unseen—the histories, the stories, or even the names of a people that were undocumented, erased?

I asked myself that question late one evening as I looked at the sun setting behind the hills on the Bay of Portobelo on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama. The view from my studio faces the remains of a dock that was, at one time, the first encounter with tierra firme for many weary and enslaved black feet whose journeys began months before in Africa.

The setting sun in Portobelo reflects off the cerulean blue sky and puffy white clouds unto the still waters of the bay, producing a rather unique effect of light that seemingly glows from beneath the surface of the water. I wondered—could this light be the souls of those that did not disembark?

The following morning I felt compelled to begin imagining and imaging the anonymous faces of the children that did not arrive in Portobelo on those slavers. My drawing session attracted a few neighborhood children who began guessing who the subjects were in my drawings. Ese parece a Jerónimo. No, no, parece a Tatú, el primo de Gustavo! Their guessing game made me realize that my drawings were probably not that anonymous after all. Maybe, my drawings were informed by the faces of the children I saw every day in my neighborhood. And if that is the case, I thought, maybe the faces in my drawings bear phenotypic resemblances to their ancestors, as well as family members of their ancestors, that perished at sea. The people of Portobelo are, in some cases, direct descendants of Africans that arrived in the village enslaved.

So began my journey. I became obsessed with knowing the faces in my drawings. I wanted to know their stories, their names. Naming the children proved to be easy. I simply looked up traditional ethnic African names from villages in areas where the enslaved were abducted. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that a young girl named Ye from the village of Ejisu might have been on a slaver and the same can be said of a Babatunde of Lagos. Their stories however, eluded me.

I returned to Atlanta that fall with a small portfolio of line drawings of faces that I reworked into a series of prints during an artist residency at Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia. But their stories continued to elude me. Finally I approached my colleague and art partner, the poet Opal Moore and asked her to live with my children for a while to see if they would tell her their stories.

And they did.

Through the rituals of seeking, seeing, and imaging that is Art, they gave Opal the fragmented stories of their lives in Africa: a moment when the slave catchers arrived in a village called Ndeer, of the women who put the stories of their lives into songs for children to sing, women who charged a favorite daughter, the one who wove stories in baskets, to carry their story in song and basket back to us, the yet-unborn. The story of women who lay fire in every corner and doorway to avoid capture and enslavement; who "climbed the ladder they made of smoke to confront their maker."

The stories they left were the stories of how they had loved.

Opal and I began a collaboration that allowed us to see the faces and hear the voices of the children that others wished to erase. Through art we retold their stories in Atlanta, in Panama, in New York, on Gorée Island in Senegal, in Bellagio, Italy and in various cities in Germany. We retold their stories sometimes together and at times in separate presentations. The important thing however, is that we were able to defy the canon that defines anonymity. Our children had faces, names, and voices!

Opal writes, "Once lost, how can something as intangible as identity, so lightly fixed in a given name, be regained? This question was my point of entry into an artistic collaboration with Arturo and the subject of his series of prints titled, The Children of Middle Passage. We entered into an active artistic conversation that has spanned several years and multiple revisions and re-visionings, resulting in an interdisciplinary, multifaceted art performance work, and now a book."⁸Opal Moore, "Artist's Statement," in Children of Middle Passage, Arturo Lindsay and Opal Moore, eds. (Lindsay and Moore, 2006)

Our book however, is still a work–in–progress. But, in light of the recent murders of young black men at the hands of the police and other young black men through gun violence I wonder if our book is reminding us that we are still in middle passage.

Maybe Opal has a point. She made a significant change in the title of my series of prints when she said, "The absence of the article "the" in Children of Middle Passage allows us to understand that we are still in middle passage." Historical documents are a valuable source for knowing important moments and events in the past. They are however, told mostly by the victors, the wealthy, the literate, and the elite.

But, is that the whole story? I believe not, especially for Africana Studies students and scholars. The epistemological view of the tabula rasa African, as a person devoid of a culture, language, or religious belief system worthy of preservation was applied as enslavers instituted the practice of erasing African cultures by imposing European customs and values. It was believed that the best slaves were those who were a blank slate capable of adopting, defending, promoting, and even proselytizing the religions and cultures of their enslaver. While it is possible to enslave a person who has his/her own belief system and culture intact, it is impossible to make that person a slave.

That said, it takes art and poetry, music and dance, theater and performance art and, yes, story telling to connect with the spirit of the enslaved person that is resisting erasure. It takes an artist to conjure up a powerful ashé that can erase the erasure transcending time, space, and malevolence. It also takes scholars, critics, and art historians familiar with the aesthetics of ashé to interpret the telling of that story. And finally it takes courageous academics regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin to force the academy to widen its field of view in order to see; in order to know; and therefore to understand the palimpsest that is our collective histories.

Arturo Lindsay

Arturo Lindsay is professor of art and art history at Spelman College. He is an artist-scholar who consucts ethnographic research on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions in contemporary American cultures.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr: Writing at the Plantation's Edge

The Studia must be reinvented as a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an "outer view" which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject . . . to attain to the position of an external observer, at once inside/outside the figural domain of our order.

Sylvia Wynter, "The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism," 1984

As a result of rallies we got courses in "black literature" and "black history" and a special black adviser for black students and a black cultural center, a rotting white washed house on the nether edge of campus.

David Bradley, "Black and American," 1982

There comes a time when the only thing that one can do is admit defeat. Standing at the tail end of a Black Studies movement established as part of the articulation of anti-segregationist, anti-colonialist African and African American political and cultural insurgencies, one is made painfully aware of a sort of necessary and inevitable social and professional marginalization structuring the everyday existence of the so-called black scholar. The broadly imagined ethical outlines of even the most valued projects of black intellectualism continue as ornamental, overly moralistic, never quite fully valid aspects of the industry/government/education complex that we decorously name the American University. Accommodated in ever more brightly colored, if distantly placed and institutionally vulnerable, houses, the Black, African, Africana scholastic project has only the most limited means by which it might affect a sort of inchoate articulation. When times are good and the funding secure, the history, thought, and culture of the peoples of the African Diaspora might be taken as a sort of reiteration of the central conceits of American and European cultural and intellectual orthodoxy. A single red/brown/yellow/blue face appearing intermittently in recruitment brochures or faculty lounges boastfully reminds us of the meritocratic liberalism that presumably underwrites the basic structures of our most cherished educational and intellectual institutions. More impressive still, the scholar of Black Studies might make great use of an apparently never too tired for service "plus one" account of black subjectivity in which the most traditional ideas of Universalism, Cosmopolitanism, and western Modernity are presumably broadened and deepened through the indication that some representative "black" individual "was there." And when times are lean and narratives of scarcity rub harshly against notions of open-minded largesse, one might enact again, and yet again, a sort of hysterically ineffectual theatrical rebellion, identifying the many always easy to uncover moments of racialist hostility and insensitivity that are among the most profoundly resilient aspects of American and European societies.

Still, regardless of the modes of attack and address, only the most limited consideration of Africa and the African Diaspora can be discerned within the best supported and most cherished precincts of the human sciences. There is so little awareness of the broad ideological structures on which the various practices of professional "humanists" are established that it becomes difficult to imagine that we might either critique or redirect basic modes of research and study. Broach the topic of lists, fields, and curricula with the most generous of colleagues and you will very likely be met with a handwringing and apologetic, if firmly conventional, story of limited resources, fixed traditions, bureaucratic obstacles, and the rigid expectations of a harshly disciplining market. At the moment of challenge, humanistic studies are imagined to exist not so much as a complex of ideologies, discourses, and institutions with an identifiable and relatively short history, but instead as an impossibly distant force, almost metaphysical in nature, that we are able to approach with only the most unstable of intellectual prosthetics.

The crisis of the humanities is first and foremost a failure of the political and ethical imaginaries that stabilize the labor that one presumably does as a practitioner of the human sciences, as a writer. It is the ever more vertiginous social reality confronting intellectuals who approach their work through a sort of willed ignorance of the ideological organization of the Studia. The philosophical and ethical arrangements of the human sciences become much clearer once one appropriates the historical understandings given us by Michel Foucault and amplified by Sylvia Wynter, once we recognize that not only are the conceptual and instrumental arrangements that we use to teach, research, write, and publish decidedly new phenomena, but also that they are inextricably tied up with the violent extraction of value and labor. In a sense then, we are lucky in the United States to have so little opportunity to cover over the absolutely intimate relationship between universities, colonization, and enslavement. Step onto the campus of one of the country's great sites of learning and you are quite likely stepping onto a plantation, an institution in which the expression of so-called high culture was—and is—fueled by the literal entrapment and internment of Africans and their descendants.⁹The deep connections between especially the most elite American universities and slavery is becoming ever more clear. Brown University, the College of William and Mary, Harvard University, Emory University, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, Yale University, and Columbia University, among many others, either held slaves directly, utilized slave labor in the building of their campuses, traded slaves as commodities, greatly supported the work of slavery apologists (and later apologists for colonization and segregation), or more likely some rich combination of all these things. The main campus of Johns Hopkins University is built on the former Homewood Plantation. Tours through the still standing main house are a regular part of campus life. For more on this matter see, Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

Those gates and guards through and by which we pass are not simple adornments, but instead absolutely necessary safeguards within a set of protocols designed to distinguish (European) order from (African) chaos. The disciplinary structures most commonly associated with the humanities operate first and foremost to yoke the "free-floating energy" of the untidy (Negro) to a process by which a disembodied "universalist" (White) Order might be named. The trick, of course, is to accomplish this particular procedure without seeming to do so. There is good reason that there has been so little discussion of the relationship between the history of Atlantic slavery and the development of the "disciplines." That procedure would invite consideration of the rather uncanny overlap of these institutions' developmental timelines, coming to maturity as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and "fracturing" in the twentieth. Even more to the point, a truly historicist and anti-white supremacist examination of the history of the human sciences would necessarily have to take into account not only the fact that the descendants of the enslaved and the colonized continue to do the unseen, unwanted, irrational work of the university, dumping trash cans, cleaning toilets, and preparing meals, but also that the scholars whom they service incessantly, even manically, reiterate a set of intellectual protocols built precisely on never noting that their cleverness and disinterestedness are often themselves examples of brittle misunderstanding(s) of the conditions of their own labor.

It comes as no surprise then that the Black Culture Center should be so studiously ignored as it stands mocking and mocked at the plantation's edge. It is not dissimilar from the skulls, bone, teeth, and bits of decomposing cloth that one might encounter in a Catholic reliquary. Fascinating in its vulgarity and decrepitude, the rotting whitewashed house seems to point in two directions at once, naming a desiccated past while demanding a certain horrified attention in the present. Wynter writes:

It is within the same governing laws of figuration and its internal logic that the Black Culture Center was proscribed to exist on the nether edge of the campus. It functioned as the target stimuli of aversion, with respect to the Euroamerican order of the center of the campus, which is then enabled to function as the object stimuli of desire. The relation, functioning dually at empirical and valorizing levels, if stably kept in phase, ensures the stable production of the same shared endogenous waveshapes, in Black students as well as Whites—the same normative seeing/valuing, avoiding/devaluing behaviors. Hence the paradox that, after the turbulence of the 1960s and the 1970s the Black Culture Centers in their nether-edge-of-the campus place function to enable the recycling (in cultural rather than racial terms) of the Order/Chaos dynamics of the system-ensemble.¹⁰Sylvia Wynter, "The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism," boundary 2 vol. 12, no. 3 – vol 13, no. 1 (Spring–Autumn, 1984): 47.

Here I take some solace in the conditional nature of Wynter's most damning observation. If the fraught relations between Black Studies and "the Euroamerican order of the center" are stably kept in phase, then we condemn ourselves to the reiteration of those normative behaviors and modes of thought established in the crucibles of enslavement and colonization. The very presence of the shabby house at the edge of campus marks the possibility of rupture within these systems. It suggests modes of knowledge and articulation that, if not elegant, are at least not so wholly and innocently disconnected from the means of their own replication as to exist in a sort of creative stasis, operating like the disciplined, defeated professor of literature whose tepid passions never quite reach the level of either offense–or brilliance.

While I knowingly, even lovingly, embrace the disorder that is Black Studies, I cannot bring myself to celebrate that embrace. Sitting here on the ugly side of campus, collecting my thoughts in rooms that though not obviously rotting are nonetheless likely to be swept away come the next great wind, I know that my efforts must be read as at once marginal and suspect. I "have every interest in challenging an order of figuration" that programs my own negation.¹¹Wynter, "The Ceremony," 49. Yet, mine is not a blameless opposition. I do not naively celebrate the obvious fraying of the humanities project. Nor do I yearn for an easy reorganization of priorities, the moving of the white house to the center. Instead I am seeking, however haltingly, for the reinvention of the Studia in a manner that would allow for the articulation of a fully universal humanism and the dismantling of the deeply imbedded white supremacy that so firmly establishes American and European intellectualism. In doing so, however, I must by necessity recognize the Black Studies apparatus itself as having been established within the Order/Chaos ideological nexus that lies at the heart of the human sciences. Thus in the necessarily radical practices of disarticulation that one hopes will soon and very soon take up our attention and our energies, it is quite unclear if the rotting house will survive.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is professor of English at The Graduate Center City University of New York. He is author of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York: NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Men (New York: NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the Hours and the Black American (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Martha Southgate: What Came Before

This presentation raises questions regarding the meaning of history and influence as refracted through my novel Third Girl From The Left. This novel was written very much with an awareness of the weight of history both on my fictional characters and on the lives of African Americans.

Not only does this presentation consider history, both within the novel and in everyday life, crucial to one novel's shape, but I also explore the ways in which other novels, among them Toni Morrison's Sula, provided direct inspiration, in some senses parenting this novel into being, informing crucial passages and my understanding of how Third Girl would develop. I offer thoughts on how that parenting might be made more explicit in the examination of certain literature and contemplate the implications of these cross-literary relationships. 

About Martha Southgate

Martha Southgate is author of Another Way to Dance (New York: Delacorte Press, 1996), The Fall of Rome: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2010), Third Girl from the Left (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and The Taste of Salt (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2011). Southgate has received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, Hurston/Wright Legacy award, the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. Her non-fiction work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence.