Archaeologies of the African Diaspora: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States

Slave Communities and Pottery Variability in Western Brazil: The Plantations of Chapada dos Guimarães

“…Nevertheless, some critical methodological aspects regarding the relationship between pottery and the cultural practices of the slaves must be taken into account before exploring the meanings of these assemblages. While only few archaeological investigations have been carried out about slavery in Brazil (see an overview of these studies in Funari 2007;Symanski and Souza 2007;Singleton and Souza 2009; and, more especially on the Quilombo dos Palmares, see Funari 1999;and Orser and Funari 2001), a variety of approaches have been suggested by Americans for the archaeological investigation of slavery in the context of the colonial encounters, which have influenced the ways in which slaverelated pottery have been analyzed. They include ethnogenesis (Perry and Paynter 1999), transculturation (Deagan 1998; on the early use of this approach in Cuba, based on the seminal work of Ortiz, 1983[1940], see Corzo 1988and Dominguez 1980), the "cultural transformation approach" (Armstrong 1999) and, especially, creolization (Dawdy 2000;Ferguson 1992), besides some inherited notions based on theories of acculturation (Otto 1984;Wheaton and Garrow 1985) and ethnicity (Schuyler 1980).…”

‘Those Stones Speak:’ Black-Activist Engagement with Slavery Archaeology in Rio de Janeiro

“…In the Americas outside Brazil, archaeology that specifically focuses on the experience of enslaved African populations and African-descended communities has developed more substantially in Cuba and in the United States (Singleton and de Souza 2009), where research has particularly addressed sites that implicitly recall slavery suffering and subordination, such as plantations, slave quarters, and burial grounds. Further examples can be found in some Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Barbados, and the Dominican Republic (Delle, Hauser, and Armstrong 2011;Orser 1998;Posnanski 1984).…”

“…However, only in the USA can a relatively well-established black-activist engagement with African-American and slavery archaeology be found. This phenomenon has been highly influenced by the anti-exclusion and anti-racist political struggles that developed more effectively in the second half of the 20th century, and has typically relied on a relatively significant presence of politically engaged black professionals (Singleton and de Souza 2009). Black subjectivity in Afro-American archaeology, as LaRoche and Blakey (1997, 93) argue, is crucial because it aims to revert the simultaneous processes of invisibilization and misrepresentation that white researchers have made of African-American experience within historical archaeology (LaRoche and Blakey 1997; Perry and Blakey 1999;Singleton 1995).…”

Por onde os africanos chegaram: o Cais do Valongo e a institucionalização da memória do tráfico negreiro na região portuária do Rio de Janeiro

“…Na Europa, países como Inglaterra e Holanda têm uma trajetória consolidada na discussão pública sobre as injustiças cometidas durante a escravidão, promovendo a criação de monumentos que resgatem de forma crítica a memória do tráfi co negreiro (Chivallon, 2001;Nimako; Simone Vassallo e André Cicalo Willemsen, 2011). Nas Américas, os Estados Unidos ocupam um lugar chave tanto em termos de pesquisas quanto de políticas públicas, graças à presença de pesquisadores negros engajados como Michael Blakey (2010) e Theresa Singleton (Singleton;Torres de Souza, 2009). Na América Latina e no Brasil, para alguns autores, o reconhecimento da memória do tráfi co negreiro teria começado de forma tardia.…”