The Guzmán’s of Mendoza - acclaimed classical musicians

During the 19th century in Chile and for three generations, the Guzmán’s were acclaimed classical musicians. The literature indicates that their patriarch Fernando Guzmán and his son Francisco arrived in Chile from Mendoza, Argentina in about 1822. There is little or no information regarding their heritage, origins and the correct composition of their large family. There are many errors and assumptions in the literature as to the number and paternity of several of them; it is intended to correct the misinformation and provide documentary evidence of the family origins, heritage and composition. The research makes use of the Mendoza Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths Parish Books from the 18th and 19th centuries, legal documents, and published material. It is confirmed that Fernando Guzmán was born into slavery, one of five children of Maria Juana, an African slave owned by the Santo Domingo Convent of Mendoza. Fernando married Juana Agustina, also a slave of African descent, owned by the Molina Sotomayor family. Fernando and Juana Agustina had 13 children, several of whom were also born into slavery. The Guzmán’s were a family of classical musicians par excellence. To celebrate their life and work, this research identifies and reports how the family was composed and how it evolved.

Imagining the Afro-Caribbean in García Márquez’s Fiction

In a few early short stories, Gabriel García Márquez created minor characters described as “mulattos” or “negros”; the memorable character of Petra Cotes in Cien años de soledad (1967) is a “mulatta.” In El otoño del patriarca (1975), El amor en los tiempos de cólera (1985), El general en su laberinto (1989), and Del amor y otros demonios (1994), the Colombian-born author develops a more historical vision of the Caribbean as a culture inseparable from the lived experiences of descendants of the African slave trade. This article addresses the problematic construction of Afro-Caribbean subjectivity in García Márquez’s fiction, with particular attention to work published after Cien años de soledad. The 1972 short story “Eréndira” takes the story of a mulatta child-prostitute from a brief episode in Cien años and effectively hypersexualizes the Afro-Caribbean body. So, too, does El otoño del patriarca, with its frequent use of the epithet “burdel de negros” to refer to an imaginary Caribbean nation. The hypersexualization of Afro-Caribbean female characters permeates El amor en los tiempos del cólera. A psychologically dependent relationship between Simón Bolívar and his mixed-race valet in El general en su laberinto and then the “triumph” of a Spanish Renaissance poetic voice over childhood memories of African languages in Del amor y otros demonios provide the backdrop for the author’s final attempts to imagine Afro-Caribbean subjectivity in his fiction.

Ras Kimono, the Relics of Slavery and the African Diaspora: A Study on the Socio-Cultural Factors in the Haitian-Biafran Relations

It is no longer news that people of African descent were enslaved to the new world via: Caribbean, America and Europe for more than four hundred years. Rastafari movement has always engaged in the history of memory especially to reminiscence about slave experiences. Bob Marley songs are replete with such freedom chants. For example, Marley’s Redemption song and Buffalo Soldier are strong lyrics about the horrors of slavery. The cultural linkage between the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria and Haiti in the Caribbean is examined, especially the nexus between Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Haitian support to the Biafran struggle during the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970 re-echoes the African slave narratives as Kimono recorded in his song.

The Bridge Connecting Silkworms to Mosquitos

This chapter relates the history of sugar, a thread that links the Silk Roads, Portuguese sailors, Atlantic islands, endangered seals, the African slave trade, and yellow fever, all because of our physiological need for glucose, which we satisfy with sugar. The chapter tells how from its origin in Southeast Asia, sugarcane, later called “Creole cane” and processing technology moved along the Silk Roads to Western Asia, then to Mediterranean islands. To begin with, Portuguese colonists transformed the Atlantic island of Madeira into a large sugar producer using slave labor until ecological and economic collapse forced production to move to São Tomé, using Angolan slave labor. After Portugal discovered Brazil, colonists took sugarcane with them, creating large plantations and initiating the enslavement and trans-Atlantic movement of millions of Africans. As the chapter shows, sugar production moved into the Caribbean and Central America, and African slave ships inadvertently carried yellow fever and yellow fever mosquito to the Americas.

John Woolman

John Woolman (b. 1720–d. 1772), a Quaker shopkeeper, tailor, and farmer from West Jersey, traveled extensively throughout colonial America as an itinerant minister and produced writings on the most important social problems of the era. Woolman was part of a group of ministers working for increased discipline and broad reform among Friends. He cared deeply about the right conduct and purity of Quaker meetings for worship, and these concerns informed his social thought, as did his various livelihoods. His experience selling goods from his store and the produce of his farm made him increasingly aware of how the transatlantic economy depended on enslaved labor, and in his early twenties he began to think seriously about enslavement as an evil with which Quakers needed to reckon. Witnessing plantation slavery on a journey to Virginia and North Carolina in 1746 reinforced Woolman’s concerns and inspired his first antislavery essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754). Woolman began composing a journal recounting his life for the moral and spiritual edification of Friends in 1756, during the violence of the Seven Years’ War. This imperial conflict radicalized many Quakers in colonial America, as Friends took a firmer stance against war, helped to negotiate on behalf of Indigenous people, and approved stricter measures against coreligionists who practiced enslavement. This trend can be seen in Woolman’s second antislavery essay, Considerations on Keeping Negroes . . . Part Second (1762), in which he took a stronger position against enslavement by focusing on the violence of the African slave trade. In the last decade of his life, Woolman would write about a growing range of social issues. His 1763 journey to the Native settlement of Wyalusing to visit the Munsee leader Papunhank made clear to him the plight of Indigenous peoples dispossessed from their land. As Woolman focused less on the business of storekeeping and more on farming, he also wrote against the oppression of tenant laborers by wealthy landowners. His last essay published during his lifetime, Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind (1770), is a theological reflection on social ills of wealth. Woolman died while traveling in ministry among Quakers in England, and his journal was published posthumously as part of The Works of John Woolman (1774). No other colonial American writer wrote with such clarity and theological conviction about the injustices of the transatlantic economy and the need for reforms to address them.

Cruzando caminhos em Ibicaba: escravizados, imigrantes suíços e abolicionismo durante a Revolta dos Parceiros (São Paulo, 1856-1857)

<p>Este artigo explora as relações entre escravizados e imigrantes europeus no oeste paulista tendo, como pano de fundo, a Revolta dos Parceiros, ocorrida em Limeira no ano de 1856. Considerado um marco na história da imigração no Brasil, o levante de colonos suíços contra o sistema de parceria na Fazenda Ibicaba contava também com o apoio dos cativos que trabalhavam nos cafezais adjacentes à Colônia Senador Vergueiro e demais fazendas vizinhas. Apagada pela historiografia, a conspiração negra de 1856 revela que a convivência entre colonos e escravizados no contexto do fim do tráfico acelerou a circulação de ideias sobre o fim da escravidão no Brasil. Ao retornar à Revolta em Limeira, este artigo aborda o encontro de perspetivas subalternas sobre o abolicionismo atlântico em Ibicaba para afirmar a geopolítica negra como elemento constituinte dos significados do mundo do trabalho na década de 1850.</p><p>Crossing Paths at Ibicaba: Slaves, Swiss Immigrants, and Abolitionism during the Sharecroppers’ Revolt (São Paulo, 1856-1857)</p><p>This article examines the relations between the enslaved and European immigrants in western São Paulo against the background of the 1856 Sharecroppers’ Revolt that took place in Limeira. Considered a benchmark in the history of immigration in Brazil, the uprising of Swiss colonists against the “sistema de parceria” at the Ibicaba plantation also counted on support from enslaved populations in the vicinity of the Colônia Senador Vergueiro. Erased by the historiography, the 1856 black conspiracy shows that interactions between slaves and settlers in the context of the ban on the African slave trade sparked the circulation of abolitionist ideas in Brazil. By revisiting the revolt in Limeira, this paper explores how subaltern perspectives of the Atlantic world met in Ibicaba and claims a place for black geopolitics in defining Brazilian labor history in the 1850s.</p><p>Slavery | Colonization | Revolt | Abolitionism</p>

White Women Poets: The Fight Towards the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The British Parliament passed the act to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Many historians focus on the powerful men that challenged Parliament such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, but rarely do they acknowledge the active role that British white women played in the abolition campaign. Women raised awareness of the slave trade by supporting abolition societies, promoting the boycott of slave-grown sugar, and creating anti-slavery writing. Poetry, in particular, was the most common type of anti-slavery writing done by white women. This paper explores the use of poetry as a tool to promote the abolition of the slave trade by examining Mary Birkett Card’s A Poem on the African Slave Trade, Hannah More’s Slavery, A Poem and Sorrows of Yamba, and Ann Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade. These poems highlight three key themes including the separation of family, Christianity, and the luxuries the British possessed at the expense of the Africans suffering.

Mooring Aslima

In Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, the entanglement of Spain and Morocco emerges through the diasporic figure of Aslima, the Moroccan sex worker. This essay examines McKay’s Maurophilia, which he circuitously refers to as “Afro-Orientalism” in his various writings. Maurophilia not only foregrounds Aslima’s associations with Spain and Morocco but also highlights McKay’s engagement with transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas, including the intra-African slave trade and Iberian Moriscos and conversos settling in North Africa following the Reconquista. This essay argues that while Aslima’s associations with Moorish-Iberian performance styles influence McKay’s modernist poetics and radical aspirations for a global pandiasporic Black alliance, Romance in Marseille ultimately forecloses the prospect of a pan-Mediterranean, Black Atlantic globalism because of contradictions of gender and religion.