Up From Slavery: Afro-Brazilian Activism in São Paulo, 1888–1938
Throughout the centuries of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, Africans and their descendants struggled against a social system that sought to reduce them to chattel. They found that their struggle was to continue, albeit in different forms, long after abolition. In Brazil, emancipation in 1888 was followed the next year by the demise of imperial government and the installation of the First Republic. This created a new political and legal framework for Afro-Brazilians to negotiate positions in society. Racial relations in former slave societies are not the simple result of imposed identities and social spaces by a dominant group upon an oppressed group. They evolve from a dialectical power struggle in which blacks as well as whites affect the outcome.