People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments \ The initial version of what would become this book was my doctoral dissertation for the Department of History at the Federal Fluminense University, Rio de Janeiro. I thank the History Department, where I already worked, for allowing me two years of unencumbered time to organize and write the dissertation. In particular, I thank my colleagues at the Laboratório de História Oral e Imagem, where my relationships with Ana Maria Mauad, Ângela de Castro Gomes, Hebe Mattos , Ismênia de Lima Martins, and Paulo Knauss always provided attentive and fruitful collaborations. In compiling and organizing data from a range of sources, I was ably assisted by Fluminense history students Luciana Gandelman, Mônica Monteiro, and Juliana Barreto Farias. I gained access to critical documents through the friendly generosity of the members of the Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia, especially Américo Bispo da Silveira and Roberto Machado Passos. I also wish to express thanks to the sta√s of the other archives and libraries where I carried out research, of which the personnel at the Arquivo da Cúria Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro deserve particular recognition. Of course I am also indebted to all the authors whose works I have cited in the following pages, but I feel a fundamental obligation to those writers whose works shaped my questions, research, and analysis in a more indirect or unnoticed way; undoubtedly, my bibliography would be more complete if my memory were a bit better. Manolo Florentino and Luciana Villas-Boas were responsible for bring- xii | Acknowledgments ing attention to this work and fostering its publication in Brazil in 2000. Since then, many people and institutions have engaged with it, and in the process brought wider attention to it. I will highlight only some: Bernard Vincent wrote a flattering review in Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain; Ambassador Alberto da Costa e Silva read the text with exquisite care; with Hebe Mattos and Silvia Lara I shared my work and permanent friendship. I owe my utmost gratitude to my students, and to the great majority of my readers, who are personally unknown to me. They have consistently provided the most meaningful recognition and incentive to do better. The barriers of distance and language can appear formidable, but Devotos , as my book came to be called in Brazil, was able to cross them in the present edition thanks to the e√orts of several scholars and institutions. Stuart Schwartz, A. J. R. Russell-Wood, and Mary Karasch were among the first non-Brazilian historians to lend the book some prominent encouragement . In 2001 I achieved my first ‘‘foreign’’ visit, at the History Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, thanks in particular to Barbara Weinstein. This position provided me a valuable opportunity to begin establishing contacts with American universities, and since then I have often traveled to the United States and Canada; I am very grateful to the various institutions that have supported these academic exchanges. In 2003, thanks to a postdoctorate grant from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—capes/Brazil, I spent a year at the History Department of Vanderbilt University; Marshall Eakin, the chair at that time, was tireless in his support. During that year I enjoyed frequent visits to York University at the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora (presently Harriet Tubman Institute), where I served as an associate. During those years Jane Landers, Paul Lovejoy, and Elisée Soumonni became colleagues and friends. My first papers were published in the United States thanks to Toyin Falola and Matt Childs (The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, 2004), and to Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Women and Slavery, 2008). Finally, if the arrival of this English edition of Devotos da Cor (whose original title could not be translated directly into English without losing some force) is an expression of the book’s success in Brazil, its fortunes in this new form will depend on a much wider circle of readers, critics, and interrogators. I am grateful to all those participants at workshops and Acknowledgments | xiii conferences who heard my ideas and, even when debating them, encouraged me to continue. The final revisions for this edition were completed at the Gilder Lehman Center of Yale University, thanks to a fellowship in March of 2007. I thank the sta√ of the...