Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

black activists sought to remake the paths of slavery into paths toward free labor and citizenshi

Chapter 6, “Common Bedfellows? Brazilian Antislavery and Anti–Capital Punishment Efforts in Comparative Perspective,” examines public and political attitudes toward the death penalty in Brazil and the United States. Whereas in Brazil capital punishment was abolished by law in 1889, only one year after the abolition of slavery there, in the United States the death penalty persisted after slavery’s abolition and still exists today. Focusing on the work of Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, Peter M. Beattie investigates the ways a group of Brazilian intellectuals and politicians opposed the death penalty as an effort to promote human rights and to improve Brazil’s international image. Beattie argues that the differences between the two countries’ approach to the issue of capital punishment are not related to the countries’ respective histories of African slavery but rather to the discrete paths Brazil and the United States took toward slavery’s abolition—as well as to differences in Anglophone and Lusophone legal and political cultures. The chapter is an original contribution to the comparative study of Brazil and the United States.

Part III: Paths of Identities focuses on identity building in three South Atlantic former slave ports. These chapters shed light on how commercial, cultural, and religious exchanges contributed to constructing new Afro-Creole Atlantic identities that continued to be reshaped after the end of the Atlantic slave trade. Although the chapters’ aim is not to discuss creolization, the three authors shed light on elements of Creole communities established in Saint-Louis as well as in Bahia, Lagos, and Benguela. In chapter 7, “Between Memory, Myth, and History: Transatlantic Voyagers of the Casa Branca Temple,” Lisa Earl Castillo examines the interrelated lives of several African freedmen who were important in the early days of the Casa Branca, one of the oldest Afro-Brazilian temples in the city of Salvador, Bahia. In this chapter, Castillo brings to light the trajectories of freedmen who were closely connected to the Casa Branca temple, demonstrating that they represented a transatlantic network connecting Lagos, Salvador, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro. By