The research presented and explored in Jane-Marie's lecture is part of a larger study about the lives of enslaved and freed women, African and Brazilian, and their female descendants in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. The focus of this presentation is on the different ways in which these women constituted their families under a system of slavery, in a colonial context and in a society that was diverse culturally, racially and ethnically. The ability of the enslaved to form families has been a central concern of historians in the study of slavery across the Americas. However, scholars have gone to great lengths to identify slave families through the frequency of slave marriages and the prevalence of nuclear families; that is, using models of family formation founded in Western European and Christian traditions.
In the case of Brazilian slave society, levels of marriage were low among both the free and enslaved. However, slave marriages were particularly rare in port cities like Salvador da Bahia, a rarity that led authorities to label African and black women as promiscuous and amoral, and prompted historians to conclude that slave families were inherently unstable and always incomplete.
This presentation challenges both the traditional approaches adopted by historians of the slave family as well the notions of incompleteness and instability historians have attached to the slave family itself. Instead, it is argued here that slave family formations are better understood from a position of cultural multiplicity in which African women and their black Brazilian daughters fashioned their families out of both European and West African traditions, but that the latter offered them greater flexibility in terms of gender roles as well as providing them with alternative routes to constituting their families.
Understood in this way, it becomes possible to recuperate the slave family from the stigma of not-being-nuclear, and recover the female-headed household from a position of historical marginality and social inferiority. However, such an approach also requires, at least in the case of Brazil, accepting patterns of social organisation that do not fit neatly into parallel historical narratives of emancipation and resistance with which the slave family is frequently associated.
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