Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808-1888.

Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808-1888. By Mieko Nishida (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003, xiii plus 255 pp.).

The back cover of Professor Nishida's monograph describes it as "an examination of a complex slave society in 19th-century Brazil." Indeed, anyone who has read documents preserved in Brazilian archives appreciates the appropriateness of the term "complex" to describe life in the port city of Salvador, Bahia from the turn of the nineteenth century until slaves gained their emancipation in 1888.

The author pays close attention to the process by which African slaves, African freedpersons, and their descendants forged collective identities. She emphasizes that in Bahia the free-born descendants of Africans did not perceive themselves as a "homogeneous ethnic/racial group" (p. 6). In contrast to "linear models" of collective identity formation (as depicted in the writings of E.P. Thompson, Herbert G. Gutman, and Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price), the evolution of personal and collective consciousness (ethnic, gender, racial) among the freeborn persons of color developed in diverse ways.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author examines ethnicity and gender relations among African-born slaves in Salvador. She analyzes the manner in which Africans from different regions in Africa viewed their distinct ethnicities. African male slaves described as being from the same "nation" in Africa often labored together in work gangs. Their shared endeavors in the work place affirmed a sense of ethnic identity. African female slaves played a predominant role in the urban market economy. They engaged in entrepreneurial activities and commonly earned more money than did African male slaves. As a result, "African-born slave women were most likely to develop a stronger collective gender identity, beyond ethnic identity, in New World urban slavery than their male counterparts" (p. 46). Professor Nishida notes that perceptions of ethnicity and gender among African slaves influenced social activities (like public dances known as batuques), the creation of voluntary associations, and acts of rebellion.

Part Two describes the lives of African libertos, or former slaves. As in much of the literature on this topic, the author sees this small segment of Salvador's population as conservative in their ways. African freedpersons sought to distinguish themselves from other slaves. They often emulated the light-skinned elite. One way to accomplish this was to wear shoes; another was to purchase slaves for their own use. At least eight thousand African-born freedpersons returned to Africa. These Brazilianized Africans, many of whom settled in Lagos, Nigeria, played a significant role in the "Black Atlantic" world of the nineteenth century.

Part Three examines the lives of Brazilian-born slaves, freedpersons and free persons of color. The chapters offer a wealth of information about marriage and emancipation practices. Through meticulous analysis of the records of a black sodality (founded in 1832) that became a mutual-aid association known as the Society for the Protection of the Needy (in 1851), the author offers insights into the way that African Bahians viewed themselves and their world.

The book raises some questions for me. The term "powerless" is used twice on page one and at least two times thereafter (pp. 29, 32) to describe "enslaved peoples of African birth and descent." Yet, the monograph shows the opposite, that African-born and Brazilian-born slaves were far from being powerless. There also seems to be a contradiction. In the introduction, it is emphasized that "once they obtained freedom, the former slaves of African birth sharply distinguished themselves from their enslaved counterparts" (pp. 8, 91). Yet, chapter five describes a "convergence of identity" among African-born women and men. The author suggests that a shared sense of Africanness created bonds between African freedpersons and African slaves in the 1830s and 1840s (p. 93). Such ties were seen vividly during the 1835 Revolt of the Males, when African slaves and former slaves joined together in the largest urban slave revolt in the Americas. Might not this "African consciousness" have caused social tensions in Salvador at mid-century and contributed to the ending of the international slave trade to Salvador in 1850-51?

This monograph is an indispensable tool for the study of urban slavery in Salvador in the nineteenth century. One of its most important contributions is the way the author analyzes a myriad of racial terms (Africano, preto, negro, crioulo, pardo, cabra, mestizo, liberto, livre) as they were understood at different moments in the Bahian past.

Dale T. Graden

University of Idaho