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Reviewed by:
  • People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
  • Elizabeth W. Kiddy
People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. By Mariza de Carvalho Soares. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 344. Tables. Acknowledgments. Postscript. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.

Scholarship about exchanges between the African diaspora and the Atlantic World has been a growing field over the last 20 years. New works have explored cultural ruptures [End Page 294] and continuities and the complex reformulations of identity as Africans from many regions tried to make a home in new lands, most frequently under the harsh conditions of slavery. The most engaging of these studies have been able to trace a single individual, or groups of individuals, from a region of Africa into their new lives in the Americas and paint a picture of the world they created in a particular place. Mariza de Carvalho Soares' book, recently translated into English from the original Portuguese, manages to do just that. The study radiates from a document that Soares found in Brazil's National Library, a late eighteenth-century dialogue between an African originally from "the Kingdom of Maki," on the Mina Coast and his fellow congregants in their confraternity, housed in the Church of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia in Rio de Janeiro. Soares' curiosity about that document led her on a long journey to find out more about this congregation, the individuals involved, the disputes it chronicled, and more importantly, the complex social, cultural, and economic contexts that led to its existence. The book is the result of the meticulous work that that curiosity inspired.

The book is divided into two parts, and each part contains three chapters. The first part of the book examines the African side of the story. Soares looks at early Portuguese exploration, the slave trade in general and in particular along the Mina Coast, which corresponds roughly to what today is called the Bight of Benin. Throughout this section, Soares traces the emergence of a lexicon to describe both places and groups in the documentary record as well as the historiography, examining how these identifying terms emerged and were used in the scholarly literature.

Through this examination, Soares tackles the question of identity as it is expressed in the term nação in Brazil. This term has long been a problematic one for scholars, as has the slippery concept of 'ethnicity,' which is usually used as a translation. Instead of falling back on the vagueness of these words, Soares chooses to borrow a term from Melville Herskovits, 'provenience,' but she defines it differently than he does. The term, she explains, articulates the idea that identifying names, like "Mina" or "Maki" reflect a shared and constructed identity by captives within a particular context in the Americas, rather than the expression of culture transported whole cloth from Africa— the names reflect routes rather than roots.

Using the concept of provenience, in the second section of the book Soares examines the construction of a group identity of the Mina Maki in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. She examines not only the creation of identity within groups, but also the ways that the concept of provenience can help scholars to understand inter- and intra-group conflicts, shifting alliances, and loyalties. The institutions within which these group dynamics unfolded were the lay religious confraternities of blacks in Rio de Janeiro. Soares does an excellent job of discussing the role of lay religious brotherhoods in late colonial Brazilian society, and the ways that they served both to indoctrinate slaves and freed blacks and to offer them a space in which they could rebuild their communities— along lines of identification that they themselves created.

The history of confraternities in colonial Brazil, and other regions of colonial Latin America, is just beginning to be told, and this work will certainly serve as a new foundational [End Page 295] text on the subject. In addition, the analysis of identity and the terminology used to describe it will be of interest to scholars of subaltern groups both within and outside the field of African diaspora...

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