An “Insubordinate Occupation:” People and Plants Who Sabotaged Slavery and Forged Freedom in Brazil

• In Event: Afro-Brazilian Waterways and the Black Atlantic I - Diaspora: Ancestrality and Emancipation in Waters

Description for Program

In the province of Rio de Janeiro, throughout the 1850s, Evaristo Antônio da Costa was a healer famed among enslaved workers for his ability to render them invisible to the gaze of their masters, cure them of the various illnesses brought upon by captivity, and communicate with long-gone ancestors. Among white Brazilians, he was often a last resort to find cure to seemingly incurable diseases. This paper explores the political projects and South Atlantic intellectual repertoires of this spiritual practice the police would come to describe as “his insubordinate occupation.” Through a critical analysis of police files, newspapers, and travelers’ accounts, I demonstrate that the agency of plants, ancestors, and other human and more-than-human beings informed strategies of sabotaging slavery and creating possibilities of freedom, such as the ones we observe in Evaristo’s case in mid-19th century.
The ecology that Evaristo created and maintained consisted of a diverse community of free, freed and enslaved workers; African and Afro-Brazilian persons; powerful landowners, various ancestors, as well as powerful plants that could heal, bridge ancestral and living worlds, grant protection, or thwart large scale crop production. Emphasizing these complex ecologies in the worlds Africans and their descendants built, this paper complicates traditional narratives of Black freedom and emancipation in Brazil.

Author

• Eduarda Lira de Araujo, Harvard University