Ham’s Revenge: Theorizing Black Women’s History in Brazilian Archives

• In Event: (Re)presenting Afro-Brazil: Contesting National Narratives and Centering Transnational Circuits of Black Knowledge Production

Description for Program

Since the early 2000s, however, increasing demand for Black centered narratives of Brazil’s history has manifested profound changes in access. In what historian George Reid Andrews has called “the new Black Brazilian history,” scholars are producing work that centers Black subjects as the drivers of Brazilian history. This is in part due to the creation and wider circulation of Black archives and collections, digitization, oral history, and creative use of non-textual primary sources. And yet in the twenty-first century, Black women still occupy a
curious status in modern Brazilian history. This paper theorizes the possibilities and limitations for scholarship on Black women’s lives in the twentieth century now being produced in the twenty-first century. By highlighting advances in this field from Black Brazilian and Brazilianist feminist scholars alike, my paper intends to shed methodological light on how scholars can broaden Black women protagonism.

Author

• Cassie Osei, Bucknell University