44. AFRICA AND DIASPORA IN THE SOUTH ATLANTIC: SLAVERY, EMANCIPATION AND POST-ABOLITION (17TH-20TH CENTURIES)

From the 1990s onwards, the New Historiography of slavery in Brazil boosted studies on Africa. The black Atlantic, a term coined by Paul Gilroy, has been taken up by Brazilian intellectuals and those from elsewhere as a conceptual category for thinking about the transits, connections and exchanges between the African continent, the Americas and Europe in the centuries of trade between Europeans and African peoples, transatlantic trafficking and enslavement in the diaspora. Although research is more focused on the mirages of trafficking and slavery, in recent years there has been a significant increase in work that has reduced the scale of observation to Africa itself, especially with regard to the more contemporary issues of post-colonialism and decoloniality. On the other hand, African studies, which also have a dialogue with the diaspora, have focused on shifting the axis of analysis away from European constructions in the period of modernity, to focus on the experiences of the people who crossed the Atlantic, lived on its coastal shores, formed and participated in communities, trade, the circulation of ideas, and experienced slavery, whether as captives, freedmen or freewomen, whether European, American or African, in the 19th century. Nevertheless, we dare to broaden the concept of the Atlantic world to encompass the post-emancipation period in a broader chronological perspective, in order to dialog with studies that reflect on the black Atlantic in more contemporary temporalities. This panel aims to bring together studies on a long-term period, from the 18th to the 20th century, as it aims to bring together researchers who have been studying Africa and the Diaspora, looking at the flows and reflows between people, ideas, cultures, religions, trades that took place during the Atlantic slave trade, African slavery on both continental shores (Africa and the Americas), in the struggles for freedom, as well as in colonial and post-colonial times. In addition, we also intend to dialog with methodological inflections that privilege the fields of biography and life trajectory, as well as the interfaces between history, literature, visual culture and the cultural assumptions of decoloniality. In this sense, what are the contributions that religious practices, cultural formats, transgressions, re-significations, freedom projects, negotiations between Africans, Creoles, free people of color and non-blacks can bring to broaden the lens on the structure of slave societies in the Portuguese Empire, particularly in Brazil and in the African countries that were colonized by the Lusitanians? What were the areas of tension, negotiation and conflict between slaves and masters, Africans, Creoles and non-black individuals? What forms of organizations in the post-emancipation world of work have been built up as a means of not only economic survival? These are some of the concerns that will be discussed in this panel.