Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Front Cover
Penn State Press, Aug 10, 2005 - Religion - 304 pages

Blacks of the Rosary tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian communities that developed within lay religious brotherhoods dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas Gerais. It shows how these brotherhoods functioned as a social space in which Africans and their descendants could rebuild a communal identity based on a shared history of an African past and an ongoing devotional practice, thereby giving rise to enduring transnational cultures that have survived to the present day. In exploring this intersection of community, identity, and memory, the book probes the Portuguese and African contributions to the brotherhoods in Part One. Part Two traces the changes and continuities within the organizations from the early eighteenth century to the end of the Brazilian Empire, and the book concludes in Part Three with discussion of the twentieth-century brotherhoods and narratives of the participants in brotherhood festivals in the 1990s. In a larger sense, the book serves as a case study through which readers can examine the strategies that Afro-Brazilians used to create viable communities in order to confront the asymmetry of power inherent in the slave societies of the Americas and their economic and social marginalization in the twentieth century.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
1 European Origins of the Rosary Devotion of the Blacks
15
2 Africans in the Brotherhoods
39
3 Early Formation of the Brotherhoods 16901750
67
4 The Late Colonial Period 17501822
103
5 The Brotherhoods in the Brazilian Empire
139
6 Congados and Reinados 18881990
173
7 Voices of the Congadeiros
207
Conclusion
241
Appendix
251
Glossary
259
Bibliography
263
Index
281
Back Cover
288
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Elizabeth W. Kiddy is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Albright College.