This “experimental” session seeks to foster a dialogue among historians of Brazil studying the lives of black Brazilians. It contributes to the biographical turn in the history of slavery and the Atlantic World by analyzing the concerted and strategic ways that individuals engaged with the colonial or imperial project to achieve their own goals for improvement or empowerment. It also reflects on the limits of our sources to explore approaches that move the study of Black lives beyond a framework of slavery and resistance.

Portuguese colonial and imperial Brazilian regimes relied on social, economic, military, and cultural institutions and practices to promote the interests and assert the privileges of their white elites of European descent. This societal project consistently marginalized and oppressed most Africans and their descendants. Societal projects and individual life projects occasionally met in unexpected ways, however, opening spaces that some people of color leveraged for gains in social status, economic advance, or even political challenges to systemic exclusion. Strategically deploying the Old-Regime values, officers in the segregated militias claimed spaces for themselves in the state apparatus and vigorously defended themselves against threats to their privileges; others, like the captain studied by Mariana Dantas, rejected the place to which this colonial project consigned them. Men like the shopkeeper and diarist studied by Hendrik Kraay cultivated client-patron connections and capitalized on economic opportunities afforded by booming plantations economies that drove a growing slave trade but also the development of urban centers. A very few gained a degree of political prominence, although their political projects have been selectively remembered, as James Woodard explains regarding the abolitionist, poet, and democrat, Luiz Gama. While the individuals discussed in three of these papers were exceptional in their ability to get into the historical record, documentary sources largely erased the life stories and personal pursuits of Black Brazilians. Using the case of the West-Central Africans rescued from one of the last slave ships that sailed for Brazil, Yuko Miki reflects on the difficulties of writing about “exceptional” lives that have been excluded from the historical record.

The individual life trajectories discussed in this panel, marked by both successes and failures in achieving their life goals, reveal much about the contingencies, obstacles, and opportunities people of color more broadly faced in these societies. This session proposes a close examination of the outcomes of these individuals’ calculations, decisions, and actions, and of their impact on others around them. It simultaneously reflects on the limits of our sources as we strive to access these lives and experiences. In this manner, it will highlight the ways in which the intersection of Black lives and societal structures informed (im)possibilities for Black Brazilians.

The panel will not include a commentator. Instead, each presenter will reserve three minutes of their time at the end of their presentation to comment on relevant intersections between their and other panelists' papers and offer suggestions for further discussion. The chair will facilitate this part of the discussion and, as appropriate, contribute to it as well.