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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This is the first part of a three-panel series on “Afro-Brazilian Waterways and the Black Atlantic.” According to the quilombola “translator of knowledges” Antônio Bispo dos Santos, famously known as Nego Bispo, “a river that flows in Brazil is in confluence with a river that flows in Africa” as he “realized this happens through the rain, through the clouds—through rivers in the sky.” In this panel series we humbly seek to follow his teachings on counter-colonizing through the great confluence of knowledges on ancestrality, belonging, and emancipation in constant flow between Afro-Brazilians and the Black Atlantic. Be it in colonial, imperial, authoritarian or democratic republican times, these panels seek to debate how Africans and Afrodescendants in Brazil established their own emancipatory epistemologies, politics, and communities rooted in notions of Diaspora, The Environment, and Internationalism. This panel series was organized collectively, by Manoel Rendeiro, Eduarda Araujo, and Marcelo José Domingos.
In this panel dedicated to “Diaspora: Ancestrality and Emancipation in Waters,” panelists will explore how Africans and Afro-Descendants in Brazil have known several water flows, from oceans to creeks, through a transatlantic perspective. This panel will converge knowledge about the African Diaspora to rethink waterways of securing ancestrality and emancipation from the Crossing of Kalunga to the Afterlives of Slavery. Significantly, the panelists are committed to dialogue with larger issues on the studies of the African, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, showcasing Brazil as a critical diasporic, transimperial, and transnational uneven space of racial, ethnic, laboral, agrarian, sexuality, and gender formation shaped by African peoples and their descendants.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Manoel Rendeiro Neto, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Kalunga, or Decentering the Middle Passage - Yuko Miki, Fordham University

• Uprooting Enslavement: Agro-Forests of Marronage in Amazonian Waterscapes - Manoel Rendeiro Neto, Yale University

• Bodies of Water: Hydric Cartography, a Flow into EthnoWEgraphy - Paulo Ramos, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

• An “Insubordinate Occupation:” People and Plants Who Sabotaged Slavery and Forged Freedom in Brazil - Eduarda Lira de Araujo, Harvard University

Discussant

• Myles Ali, University of California, Merced