Brazilian Slave Revolts

Brazil received the largest number of enslaved Africans in the countries in the Americas. Of the 12.5 million men and women taken captive in Africa, about 5.5 million (44 percent) were sent to Brazil, which became one of the main slaveholding areas in the world. The enslavement of Africans and their descendants persisted in that country for more than three centuries and permeated all aspects of life. There was no work in which slave labor was not used, whether in the fields or in towns and cities throughout Brazil’s vast territory. The wealth produced by the exploitation of sugar cane, coffee, and the extraction of gold and diamonds relied primarily on the work of enslaved Africans. Brazil was built on the backs of Blacks. If the work of enslaved Africans and their descendants marked the building of wealth in that country, the struggles they waged over the centuries were also part of Brazilian history. The enslaved resisted the world conceived by their masters in many ways: by sabotaging the production of goods, slowing the pace of work, escaping, forming quilombos (maroon communities), killing masters and overseers, and planning slave revolts. These various forms of resistance coexisted during over three centuries of slavery in Brazil, but above all in the 19th century, when most of the collective slave revolts occurred. This does not mean that there were no uprisings before that time, but the accelerated arrival of Africans in the 19th century and the dissemination of several revolutionary ideologies (such as Islamism and the ideas of equality and freedom arising from the Enlightenment) created a favorable context for the outbreak of mass revolts. It was in the 1800s, specifically in 1835, that Brazil witnessed the largest urban uprising of enslaved individuals in the Americas when the Revolt of the Malês erupted in the streets of Salvador, Bahia.

Suspending Unbelief

This chapter interprets Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Redwood as her response to a challenge posed by William Ellery Channing: to add an accession of feeling to overly-cool Unitarianism. Redwood responds to Channing’s challenge and to the period’s larger orthodox backlash against Unitarianism by reconciling liberalism with the conviction of belief, a balance that Sedgwick presents as essential for national cohesion in a post-revolutionary context. The novel portrays this post-revolutionary context as threatened by various forms of radicalism (slave revolts, class resentment, Shaker enthusiasm) that the novel links to memories of the French Revolution. It offers sentimental Protestant Christianity, characterized by a balance of zealous belief and broadminded tolerance, as the solution, albeit one that is expressly intolerant to non-Christians and unbelievers. The chapter draws on correspondence, sermons, and religious print culture to explain these theological and political problems and imagined solutions in Sedgwick’s novel.

Gender, Slavery, War, and Violence in and beyond the Age of Revolutions

A definition of war limited to fields of battle orchestrated by monarchs or nation-states elides a primary form of state-sponsored violence at the heart of European wars of empire—slavery. It involved the forcible conversion of persons to chattel through the legal and military arms of the state—a conversion secured through the subjection of sexual, productive, and reproductive labor and the erasure of genealogies and family ties. In this sense, slavery could be seen as a protracted state of war. Armed conflict fueled the slave trade, slave revolts blended into “official” wars, and enslaved people sometimes spoke of slavery as a state of war. Soldiers and the state march front and center in the archives, their presence camouflaging the gendered implications of warfare for women, families, and statecraft. Yet armed conflict in the Age of Revolutions spilled beyond the battlefield, constructed distinct pathways to emancipation for men and women, and enshrined new, gendered forms of citizenship. These interrelated themes are the focus of this chapter.

Dread Dialectics

Rounding out a discussion of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, the author engages in a dialogue with his respondents about the significance of the congress. This essay assesses the legacy of the 1968 congress as a manifestation of the black radical tradition and a critical involvement with socialism. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, it argues that black freedom struggles in the Americas and Europe, including slave revolts, have been an essential part of the history of labor and freedom struggles. It also contends that race has been overdetermined in ways that have historically understated the centrality of black labor to the emergence of modern capitalism, to anticapitalist struggle, and to the movement for universal freedom and a more broadly defined socialism. The essay concludes by asserting that black radical politics pose a challenge to the color- and colonial-blindness of the conventional Left while at the same time reimaging what freedom can mean in the present.