Monday, April 5, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Kristin Mann, Professor Emerita, Department of History, Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellow, 2019-20

“Transatlantic Lives: Slavery and Freedom in West Africa and Brazil”

Kristin Mann’s most recent book pioneers a new approach to the recovery of transatlantic slave biographies, on the cutting edge of studies of slavery, the slave trade, and the African diaspora. The stories of the individual slaves reconstructed in the text bring to life and make real and concrete the history of an ignoble commerce that can too often be presented only in aggregated, impersonal terms. By restoring subjectivity to a number of enslaved women and men, the book casts powerful new light on how the many thousands of Yoruba-speakers forcibly transported from Africa to Brazil and Cuba during the nineteenth century forged relationships of different kinds among themselves and with others that helped them endure slavery, find paths to manumission, and, in some cases, return to their African homelands. The work presents an important new interpretation of the origins and early transformation of the Yoruba diaspora that still powerfully connects West Africa, Brazil, and other parts of the Atlantic world.