Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood

‘The book’s format, with four distinct sections with introductions and conclusions, makes it ex‐ ceptionally suited for an undergraduate syllabus, as an entire section can be assigned as if it were its own distinct, short monograph. Beyond its use in the classroom, scholars of slavery across the Americas will find Emancipatory Narratives re‐ quired reading, as the text speaks to, in sustained and important ways, historiographies far beyond gender and slavery in Brazil.’ Cassia Roth, University of Georgia

‘In this important study, Collins challenges the long-standing narrative of slave owner paternalism by revealing the unstable and precarious conditions of freed and enslaved women as mothers. African and African-descendant women’s experiences emerge throughout the book in order to confirm how incomplete freed status could be when considered through the lens of Black motherhood. In nineteenth-century Bahia, freedom suits and manumission activism were mobilized by freed and enslaved women to keep their rights over their children and to prevent separation from them. This book focuses on Black motherhood as a contested terrain, one involving the slaveholding household, the Brazilian imperial nation-state, and the worldviews that shaped African women's strategies for freedom.’ Lorena Féres da Silva Telles, Hispanic American Historical Review

‘Collins’s brilliance rests in combining a traditional social history approach in which the context and trends of nineteenth-century slaveholding Bahia share center stage with more theoretical readings of empirical sources from a Black reproductive justice framework. Collins relies on Alys Eve Weinbaum’s concept of reproductive slavery to frame more abstract discussions of motherhood, justice, and survival – at the same time that she painstakingly outlines trends related to gendered manumissions, the transatlantic slave trade, and freedom suits…. [she] is in deep and sustained conversation with multiple historiographies, from Afro-Bahian social history to Black women’s history in Brazil to the history of reproductive justice in Atlantic slave societies… Her engagement with debates over agency and resistance in slavery from a gendered lens is much needed… the text speaks, in sustained and important ways, to historiographies far beyond gender and slavery in Brazil.’ Cassia Roth, H-Net Reviews