Merle L. Bowen - For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

For Land and Liberty

For Land and Liberty is a comparative study of the history and contemporary circumstances concerning Brazil s quilombos (African-descent rural communities) and their inhabitants, the quilombolas . The book examines the disposition of quilombola claims to land as a site of contestation over citizenship and its meanings for Afro-descendants, as well as their connections to the broader fight against racism. Contrary to the narrative that quilombola identity is a recent invention, constructed for the purpose of qualifying for opportunities made possible by the 1988 law, Bowen argues that quilombola claims are historically and locally rooted. She examines the ways in which state actors have colluded with large landholders and modernization schemes to appropriate quilombo land and further argues that, even when granted land titles, quilombolas face challenges issuing from systemic racism. By analyzing the quilombo movement and local initiatives, this book offers fresh perspectives on the resurgence of movements, mobilization, and resistance in Brazil.

Merle L. Bowen is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique .

General Editor: Michael A. Gomez, New York University

Using the African Diaspora as its core defining and launching point for examining the historians and experiences of African-descended communities around the globe, this series unites books around the concept of migration of peoples and their cultures, politics, ideas, and other systems from or within Africa to other nations or regions, focusing particularly on transnational, transregional, and transcultural exchanges.

Titles in the series

Merle L. Bowen , For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

Michael A. Gomez , Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora , Second Edition

Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres , Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898 1948

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva , The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780 1867

Rashauna Johnson , Slavery s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions

To Firmino, Tahar, and Jaqueline

Without whom this project would not have been possible

For Land and Liberty

Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

Merle L. Bowen

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108832359

DOI: 10.1017/9781108935968