Spring Colloquy: "Beyond Queens and Captives: Women in Angola 1500-1880s"

This presentation problematizes the invisibility of women in West Central African history, specially in the pre-1850 period. It is based on my upcoming book, Beyond Queens and Captives, and covers a long period marked by change, including contact with Europeans, Portuguese conquest, expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, centralization of local states, growth of local forms of slavery, and transition to trade in natural resources. It ends with the so-called scramble for Africa in the 1880s, when European powers divided the African territories into colonies. In this study, and this presentation, African women are the main historical actors, as rulers, farmers, merchants, and healers. They played crucial productive and reproductive roles in West Central African societies. In this talk, I will examine some life stories to explore how internal and external factors led to profound transformations in West Central African societies.

 

Mariana P. Candido is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History and the director of the Institute of African Studies, at Emory University.

Dr. Candido is a specialist in West Central African history during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Her books have received awards, including the 2023 African Studies Association Best Book Award in African Studies for Wealth, Land and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery and Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Her previous book, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013); received an honorable mention / African Studies Association. She has also published Fronteras de Esclavización: Esclavitud, Comercio e Identidad en Benguela, 1780-1850 (Colegio de Mexico Press, 2011), translated into Portuguese Fronteras da Escravização (Universidade Katyavala Bwila, 2018). Candido has organized A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024); co-edited with Adam Jones, African Women in the Atlantic World. Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1680-1880 (James Currey, 2019); Carlos Liberato, Paul Lovejoy and Renée Soulodre-La France, Laços Atlânticos: África e africanos durante a era do comércio transatlântico de escravos (Museu Nacional da Escravatura/ Ministério da Cultura, 2017); and Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora, with Ana Lucia Araujo and Paul Lovejoy (African World Press, 2011). She has also authored more than 30 articles.

In 2022, Mariana Candido was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK; the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Berlin, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the Luso-American Foundation. Since 2016, Candido is one of the editors of the African Economic History and, since 2018, she serves as one of the five associate editors of the Oxford Encyclopedia Research of Slavery, Slave Trade and Diaspora

 

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