Event Details

A Place of Their Own: Black Culture and Resistance in Brazil

Professor Miguel A. Valerio (Washington University in St. Louis) will discuss Black culture and resistance in Brazil, especially between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before Brazil’s independence in 1822. Dr. Valerio will particularly focus on the festive culture and churches Black Catholic brotherhoods built in colonial Brazil. He will compare this more subtle, daily form of resistance with Palmares, the longest-lived community of self-freed, formerly enslaved Afrodescendants, in the Americas. Professor Valerio will discuss how the legacies of these two concrete forms of Black affirmation continue to inspire Afro-Brazilians political and cultural activism.