On Feb. 18, Ana Lucia Araujo, a history professor at Howard University, spoke to Brenda E. Stevenson, a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA, about her groundbreaking new book, 

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery

. At a time when the right wing is attempting to erase Black history and the history of slavery from public narratives, including in U.S. museums — consider President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for “restoring truth in American history” — this book tells the history of slavery in the Americas. It centers Brazil, which imported the largest number of enslaved Africans in the Americas, as well as the African continent and enslaved women.

Can you tell us about your background in terms of how it relates to the work that you do, and then give us a brief overview of the other books that you have written that bring us to this wonderful new book?

I was trained in Brazil, Canada, and France, as both an art historian and a historian. My work over the past 20 years has focused on how slavery is memorialized in the present. I was born and raised in Brazil, the country that imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. I left Brazil 26 years ago, when the importance of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the country was not visible in the public space. So I did two dissertations, one in art history focused on travel accounts of Brazil in the 19th century. Most of that work focused on the native populations in Brazil, the Indigenous populations, and also Brazilian Black populations, enslaved and free. I decided to do a second Ph.D. in history, because back then the kinds of representations in those travel accounts were not considered art history; at the same time, what I was doing was more history than art history. I became interested in returnees, freed people who left Brazil. Some of them were deported, but others followed after 1835, when we had a big slave revolt in Brazil, in Bahia, and they resettled in the Bight of Benin, where since the early 1990s there have been several projects to memorialize slavery. I came to Howard in 2008, and I started incorporating more of the United States and the Atlantic at large in my work.

This work is a testament to this long trajectory that combines history, the memory of slavery, and the Atlantic slave trade. But the idea of writing the book came from the fact that all the big books that try to give a synthesis of the history of slavery in the Americas are focused on the United States and the English-speaking world. In addition, nearly all of them are written by men. Africa often remains in the background. Many of these books are focused on national narratives, North Atlantic in particular; Africa is excluded, Brazil is excluded, and enslaved women usually are not part of these big narratives that are more centered on demographics, on economics. Because of my background of looking at how slavery matters today for people who are still alive and how we engage this past, emphasizing this human dimension of this story was something that I wanted to do. The book came from the idea of refocusing this large history by taking Brazil into account, because Brazil is the country in the Americas where the largest number of enslaved Africans were brought. Today it is the country with the largest Black population outside Nigeria, and it was the last country to abolish slavery, in 1888.

It makes perfect sense to see your trajectory as an art historian and then as a historian, as well as your personal relationship to Brazil and to the larger African Atlantic. One of the things I really liked about the book was your use of material culture, your use of images in particular. Can you talk about that and connect it to the debate on the archive?

As an art historian, I was working on a French artist. Back then, it would be impossible that a Brazilian Latino with an accent would be doing French art history. And it was a time when it was basically impossible to do art history of geographical areas that were not North America and Europe. But I kept that interest in material culture, using other methodologies that included considering material objects, visual images, monuments, buildings, and things that are part of our public space. These elements are part of my archive. When I went to the Republic of Benin to do research for my second Ph.D., I would take pictures and interview people; the monuments, ceremonies, and memorials interested me.

I believe that the archive itself has always been a problem for historians. Of course, trying to find the voices of people who were erased, were not able to write or read, and didn’t necessarily have access to writing has been a problem for historians for a long time. But we have many other important materials that can give us perspective on how these populations lived, how they engaged with each other, how they thought. So this has been somewhat natural to me. I go to the traditional archive to read documents from the 17th century, 18th century, and 19th century in particular, but the gaps are there all the time. The visual images sometimes provide us with evidence, because we can see how people are dressed. If we’re talking about photographs, the photographer is usually a male, and sometimes these photographers are taking pictures of enslaved people. These pictures are staged, but they still have information. Visual images provide us this way of thinking about the past and engaging the present that allows for more possibilities of interpretation. So the problem of the archive remains, but it’s not because we do not have access to sources. And even in the cases where the written sources are problematic, we have other sources, such as material culture and visual images, that can provide us with a rich array of possibilities.

For social historians — and I am one — the most important thing is hearing the voices of the people we are talking about, trying to recover those voices. And what you’re able to do by looking at such a large array of sources, from ship captains’ journals, missionary papers, and Catholic records to oral histories, biographies, images, buildings, etc., is you begin to provide the reader with a rich account of the actual voices of these people. I always applaud that in anything that I read, because that’s always a goal: for us to hear what they were saying, what they intended to think about, what they were thinking, what they wanted to create. Another thing that struck me is your focus on violence. Violence is a central theme in your work, as it is in slavery. You provide a lens by which your reader can see how violence manifests through so many different aspects of slavery, the disruption of family, community, society, etc. Can you talk about that? Was that something that you made certain that you included?

That’s at the root of human bondage. Slavery cannot exist without violence. This was something that I was trying to find in these records and the different kinds of narratives I was looking at. The point that I am making in the book is that to talk about this human history and the fact that slavery was intended to dehumanize Africans and their descendants, it was through violence that this was done, but there was resistance against that as well. One of the problems I had when I was doing work on memory and how slavery is represented in exhibitions and museums is the risk that this emphasis on violence is repeating the violence that was committed in the past.

But on the other hand, we cannot tell this story by evacuating the violence. This is key where slavery existed and was central, as in Brazil, because there is still this popular idea, sometimes even among my students, that slavery was milder in a place like Brazil or in Latin America in general, because it didn’t have some of the legislation segregating Blacks from whites. This is why the violence is there in all stages and is something that not only could not be avoided but had to emerge from the narrative that I was building. Of course, when you write this kind of work, you are not totally aware that this is what you are doing, but it is something that comes back all the time throughout the different chapters. And I had another concern, especially in the first chapters, which start in Africa. Works by the historian John Thornton and a book by another historian, Herman Bennett, that engaged with Thornton’s work and criticized it, and then Toby Green’s book 

start telling this story in Africa. Here, because Africans were selling enslaved Africans to Europeans, there has been an attempt to say that these relations were not violent, that Africans and Europeans were business partners. Like Bennett and Green, I was looking for that violent dimension that was there from the very beginning, from the 15th century. At the same time, I sometimes feel uncomfortable with overemphasizing victimization, when enslaved Africans were also resisting and doing great things, creating a world elsewhere that escaped this ubiquitous violence.

Well, certainly, the violence is there. And as you say, the resistance is there as well. You do a good job of balancing what enslaved people encountered, what they experienced, and how they resisted this to maintain their humanity, their lives, their sense of themselves, their families, etc. Even looking at the work of Thornton, Bennett, and other people writing from those perspectives, it does not deny the violence of the people who were enslaved. People are deciding things about enslaved Black people’s lives, and that in itself may not have seemed violent to the people who are making these decisions, but it certainly was to the people who are impacted by the decisions. That is violence.

You present such an amazing array of all the ways in which enslaved people sought to maintain their humanity and their lives and sense of themselves through resistance. Can you give us a summary of the ways people did so, both as individuals and as groups?

Resistance was there since the very beginning, when the Atlantic slave trade emerged. There were incidents in the interior, where people were captured to be sold into slavery. Then there were attempts to escape in the very beginning, before enslaved people were brought to the coasts of West Central Africa and West Africa. Of course people tried to escape. Sometimes captive Africans stayed for several weeks on the coast, waiting to be embarked on the slave ships. Enslaved people would commit acts in order to disturb the embarkation process, and some even escaped. Most slave revolts would take place just after the ships left the coast because there were more chances of being successful. Already at that moment, enslaved people were trying to take over slave ships. Throughout the Middle Passage, there were collective and individual attempts to commit suicide, kill ship captains and crew members, or force them to surrender. Upon arrival in the Americas, there were attempts to escape collectively or to organize slave revolts.

I tried to emphasize the common elements within slave revolts across different periods of time. Africans created connections with other shipmates across the Middle Passage. These enslaved people would recreate other families once in the Americas, and in some cases, they would create families through blood ties as well, by having children and marrying other people, even when all the odds were against that. But there were, of course, other forms of resistance that were more violent and extreme, such as infanticide or killing the owners or the children of the slave owners. And in some cases, resistance could be keeping their language or commemorating their gods. This is an entire history of resistance as well. What is interesting to see is how slavery always had a response of resistance.

You talk about culture, retaining one’s language, retaining one’s gods, retaining one’s child-rearing practices, naming practices, etc., as a form of resistance, and also as a form of celebrating one’s humanity and one’s past. I found your discussion about the evolution of African cultures in the diaspora in the book very interesting. You talk about what these languages and cultures were like and how people have discussed whether these cultures disappeared, remained, or were static. Can you tell us about the culture of Africans in Africa, particularly West Africa and Western Central Africa, those places from which enslaved people came, and how that changed or did not change or evolved over time, as it’s still doing so?

The first point I try to emphasize is the centrality of Africa. I wanted to not treat Africa as this homogeneous entity. That is what we see very often, even among my students. For example, if you are talking about the Bight of Benin, then you refer to a religion such as Vodun, and if you are referring to other areas, such as West Central Africa, you mention particular words that were brought to the Americas and name certain kinds of food that some enslaved women prepared. I tried to show that these cultures moved back and forth, because these connections between Africa and the Americas continued over more than 300 years. Of course, there have been many debates about how these cultures either survived or were mixed with other cultures. There is disagreement among historians. But in some places, the presence of these African cultures is much more visible.

In the case of Brazil, one example is the Candomblé religion. It remains alive in Brazil because it was possible for Africans practicing Vodun and other African religions to combine their gods and their practices with Catholicism and with the cosmologies of Indigenous populations as well. The book tries to bring to life the importance of these African cultures that survived through music, religion, food practices, names, and knowledge systems. At the same time, this survival was possible because we had a huge population of African-born people, so these cultures were constantly being fed by the arrival of new people, especially in Brazil. But there were other places where these survival practices occurred in different ways, sometimes through isolation and sometimes through more interaction with European cultures and Indigenous cultures. My main goal was to show that Africans did not arrive in the Americas as empty vessels. They had their languages; they had their cultures. They had knowledge systems about a variety of things, even about how the world existed, and also how to create things, and they brought this knowledge as a contribution to the Americas.

One way you address some of the absences in the literature is that you want your readers to understand what’s going on with women and the female experience, both as slave traders and as enslaved people who resisted and were harbingers of culture. Can you talk about some of the things that you wanted people to understand about the female enslaved experience?

This is a central element that I wanted to emphasize in the book, because part of the problem is that enslaved women were excluded from the historiography until the past 20 years. This stemmed from the idea that for every three Africans imported to the Americas, two were men and one was a woman. There has been this emphasis on the work of enslaved men, because most of the people working in plantation areas were men. But enslaved women were still crucial. In some places, they were performing work in the fields — they were not in the mines, but they were working in the fields — and in other places, especially the cities, they were very important. They had been traders, and they brought their experiences with them from the African continent. But another element is the fact that slavery was reproduced in the Americas from the wombs of enslaved women. When we don’t have the introduction of new Africans, which was happening much more intensively in Brazil than in the United States, enslaved women were giving birth to new enslaved people. And enslaved women were caring for others, caring for the children of their slave owners. They were shaping this entire universe around them, even if they were in many places numerically inferior. They were victims of a double kind of violence: the violence of enslavement itself, with physical punishment and psychological abuse, and in addition to that, their bodies were violated almost constantly. Of course, that happened to men as well, but much more with women. So this is an element that I try to bring to light, something that is difficult to talk about. It’s perhaps easier or more manageable when you are writing, but to talk about it is hard, because this violence against women was everywhere.

Yes, it was everywhere. You’re talking about sexual violence, physical violence, emotional, psychological violence, and cultural violence as well. It is something, particularly with the loss of children, that is so acute and so overwhelming when one thinks about it. So what are you working on now? What’s next?

I have this bad habit of doing several things at the same time. It can be complicated. But one work that is almost half done now is a book titled 

The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made

. I am focusing on enslaved artists and freed artists or artisans. I am using the word “art” to refer to people who created things with iron, with clay, with wood, with stone, with fibers, with fabrics. The idea is really to show the resilience. Despite the horrors of slavery, by using the knowledge they brought with them from Africa and acquired over time in the Americas, enslaved people and their descendants created, in terms of material culture and artworks, incredible things that in some cases helped them to purchase their own freedom and in other cases allowed them to create their own world, to survive the horrors of slavery.

Enslaved Africans Created Their Own World in the New World

It’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison. Head Start and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. But regular people are providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need.

Hammer&Hope

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Ana Lucia Araujo

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Enslaved Africans Created Their Own World in the New World

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