Search Results (149)

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the most significant and violent processes in global history, and the Iberian empires played a central role in its development. Yet in Spain and Portugal, the historical and public memory of slavery remains fragmented, producing silences that contrast with its historical magnitude. This study examines these silences through two complementary lenses: the academic preparation of future history teachers and the heritage narratives presented in Iberian museums, adopting a mixed-methods design. A total of 138 pre-service teachers from eight Spanish and Portuguese universities completed a questionnaire providing quantitative data to assess how the Atlantic slave trade was addressed in their university training and which didactic and heritage resources they consider most appropriate for teaching it. In parallel, exhibitions and institutional discourses were analysed in seven national and regional museums related to America, colonisation or maritime expansion, drawing on qualitative data from written interviews with museum professionals. The findings reveal limited curricular attention to the Atlantic slave trade, uneven valuation of heritage resources, and highly variable museum narratives. These results highlight the need for coordinated educational and heritage strategies that strengthen historical understanding, support democratic and intercultural competencies, and contribute to a more inclusive and critically informed public memory. Full article

A reading of the American Revolution and the post-Civil War Reconstruction period through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois’s early writings provides new insights into his theory of racial monopoly capitalism. Many Americans saw the 1776 revolution as an idealistic fight for liberty, for the slaveholding elite who held disproportionate power within the revolutionary coalition; however, consolidating power and defending their property and expansionist ambitions were primary objectives. For them, the Revolution was a strategic move to establish racial nationalism and preserve slaveholder control over economic growth and national power. A century later, Du Bois’s analysis of the “bargain of 1876” revealed a similar consolidation of power, influencing both his research on the revolutionary period and his writings on Reconstruction. The political deal in 1876 abandoned the promise of Reconstruction’s “abolition democracy,” restoring white supremacist rule. Du Bois saw this as the victory of monopoly capital, which used racism to weaken interracial labor solidarity and enforce a system of super-exploitation. By linking 1776 to 1876, Du Bois demonstrated that U.S. capitalist development had been shaped by racial oppression from its settler-colonial roots through the rise of monopoly capitalism, consistently blocking the achievement of a true, non-racial democracy. Full article

The purpose of this study is to explore social work students’ knowledge, attitudes, and support for reparations for African American descendants of chattel slavery and persistent structural discrimination. A 44-item self-administered online survey instrument was used to gather data. A total of 91 social work students across the United States responded to the survey. The findings demonstrated that there is a knowledge deficit about reparations. An overwhelming majority of students reported that they had never taken a college course that included content on reparations. To address this void, nearly 95% of the respondents indicated that they would like to learn more about H.R.40, a legislative bill that seeks to establish a commission to study proposals for reparations in the United States. Reparations align with the mission, values, and competencies of social work; therefore, students’ desire to learn more about this topic should serve as a motivator for U.S. social work educators to include this content in graduate and undergraduate courses. Full article

Background/Objectives: In Brazil, quilombos—African-descendant resistance communities—emerged during slavery and persisted beyond its abolition. The state of Paraná, in Southern Brazil, is home to 86 quilombos, yet their genetic diversity remains entirely unexplored, and little is known about their subcontinental African origins. Methods: To explore the demographic history of these communities and the reach of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Southern Brazil, we analyzed Y and mitochondrial DNA haplotypes in samples from two quilombo communities from Paraná, Feixo (n = 117) and Restinga (n = 47). Results: Our findings reveal a significant African maternal ancestry in both communities, with Feixo exhibiting 35% and Restinga showing a striking 78.72% of maternal haplogroups of African origin. Feixo’s mtDNA haplotypes display affinities with Bantu-speaking populations from Central-Western and Southeastern Africa (such as Angola, Congo, and Mozambique), whereas those found in Restinga are more closely aligned with lineages frequent in Western Africa. Y-chromosome data reveal 39.4% and 25% African paternal ancestry in Feixo and Restinga, respectively, with most African chromosomes assigned to haplogroup E1b1b1-M35, which has a broad frequency across eastern Africa. Conclusions: These results offer novel insights into the history of the African diaspora in a previously unstudied Brazilian region, suggesting African sources—including underdocumented Eastern/Southern lineages—and contributing useful new clues to their broader within-Africa affinities. Full article

Background/Objectives: Sex trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery still present in our societies. Health professionals are in a key position to identify and support victims, but adequate training is required. The aim of this study was to analyze the impact of a structured educational intervention on knowledge, perceived professional role, and attitudes toward sex trafficking of women among undergraduate nursing students at the University of Seville, Spain. Methods: A cluster randomized pilot educational trial with a pre-test–post-test control group design and one-year follow-up was conducted. A two-hour educational session addressed key concepts related to sex trafficking, health professionals’ responsibilities, and survivor support. Knowledge and attitudes were assessed at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and at one-year follow-up. Results: 199 students participated. Significant post-intervention improvements were observed in knowledge and attitudes, with sustained impact after one year despite some knowledge decay. Conclusions: This pilot educational intervention appears to improve knowledge and attitudes toward sex trafficking among undergraduate nursing students and may represent a useful strategy for sensitizing and training future health professionals in this area. Full article

Critics often cast the Creole woman of color in Lafcadio Hearn’s circum-Caribbean writings as a figure of cultural moribundity—an emblem of a Creole world fading under the pressures of modernization. However, Hearn also presents Creole women as vivacious counterdecadent agents, disruptors of the political decline experienced by Martinique’s white Creoles after citizenship was restored to the colony’s men of African descent. Through historical contextualization of Hearn’s periodical writing and his correspondence with journalist Elizabeth Bisland, this paper explains why he employs the strategies of Decadent conservatism to imagine a moment in which formerly enslaved Creole women prevent an iconoclastic Republican attack on a sculpture of the Empress Joséphine. Erected in a reactionary period after slavery’s abolition, this monument originally commemorated the reinstatement of plantocratic dominance over the Black population, but by the time Hearn saw the statue, it had become an ironic reminder of weakened white authority. The imagined actions of Hearn’s Creole women resignify the monument, making its survival attest to the limited victory of Republican egalitarianism and the survival of pre-modern traditions of racial deference. Full article

From the late seventeenth century onward, the central aim of missionary Christianity in the British Atlantic was to Christianize slavery; that is, to render the institution morally and theologically acceptable within a Christian framework. This work of “amelioration” was envisioned as a gradual process, with missionaries from both the established Church of England and a host of dissenting denominations playing a central role in its advancement. Collectively, they promoted a discourse of Christian slavery that aimed both to reassure slaveowners of the compatibility between slavery and Christianity and to frame the conversion of enslaved people as a means of producing a more obedient, industrious, and morally disciplined labor force. To be sure, in promoting a Christianized vision of slavery, missionary societies were deeply complicit in the exploitation of enslaved Africans. Yet, ironically, the very tools they employed to pacify and discipline (biblical instruction and literacy) were repurposed to articulate a platform of resistance, ultimately contributing to slavery’s undoing. This essay employs critical discourse analysis to examine how these dynamics unfolded in two pivotal uprisings in the British Atlantic world: the Demerara Rebellion of 1823 and the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 in Jamaica. In both cases, missionary endeavors contributed to the counter-discursive appropriation of biblical theology that played a critical role in transforming enslaved people into agents of political change. Still, reimagining scripture was only part of the story. Crucially, it was the alignment of a new religious consciousness with unfolding political events, that transformed simmering discontent into open revolt. Full article

Drawing upon the works of Kazadi wa Mukuma, Gerhard Kubik, Carlos de Lima, Vivian Gotheim, Wilson Nogueira, Temitope Fagunwa, and Alaba Simpson, this study traced the evolution of Bumba-Meu-Boi from its regional origins in Maranhao, Brazil, to its adaptation in Lagos, Nigeria, as an Afro-Brazilian returnee festival within the context of Lagos carnival. Beyond serving as a crucible for the historical return of repatriated Africans from Brazil following abolition of slavery in Brazil, the study also documents how the Afro-Brazilian community has been fully integrated into the Nigerian society. Through the formation of a thriving Brazilian Descendants Association, the Brazilian community has been able to sustain their Afro-Brazilian heritage through social events and community impact by preserving Brazilian architecture, culinary knowledge, festivals, teaching of Portuguese language, and the celebration of their Afro-Brazilian genealogical past. Full article

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slavery was a central element of life in colonial and early national New York. The places where the enslaved buried their dead, referred to today as African Burial Grounds, remain important sites of reflection and remembrance for many New Yorkers. However, little literature exists discussing New York’s African Burial Ground sites from a broad, comparative perspective. This study examines seven African Burial Grounds in New York City and the Hudson Valley, two historically significant regions of New York State. GIS data from all seven sites, considered alongside GIS data from nearby coeval white Christian cemeteries, reveal that while the individuals interred in New York’s African Burial Grounds represent a variety of lived experiences, certain unifying patterns nonetheless emerge in the spatial dialectics of their final resting places. The findings have implications for the preservation of Black cultural heritage throughout southeastern New York State. Full article

While often framed as historical or ‘post’colonial, the pervasive legacies of anti-Black racism, rooted in the afterlives of slavery and the dehumanization of African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) voices, continues to shape the health experiences of young ACB women in Ontario, Canada. Using an intersectional framework, this qualitative study utilized focus groups (n = 24) to understand factors influencing access to sexual and reproductive health services for young ACB women in southern Ontario. The findings reveal that fostering ACB youth engagement in the design and facilitation of healthcare programs will be vital for creating more responsive spaces to fully express sexual health concerns. It also demonstrates that Eurocentric biomedical frameworks continue to obscure young ACB women’s needs, emphasizing the necessity for culturally relevant care. Lastly, the findings indicate that internalized colonial narratives around health practices perpetuate intergenerationally, further complicating young ACB women’s access to adequate sexual and reproductive healthcare. This examination illuminates the need to address the colonial legacies within healthcare systems that continue to pathologize and hypersexualize young ACB women’s bodies. The study concludes by advocating for intersectional, youth-centered, and culturally competent approaches to dismantling the barriers young ACB women face in accessing sexual and reproductive health services. Full article

This essay examines mass castration allegations within the North Indian guru movement Dera Sacha Sauda. Drawing on court records, public commentary, and prior fieldwork, it traces how surgical procedures served as a mechanism of enforced proximity and devotional binding. Castration here functions less as renunciation than as anatomical control within a system of engineered devotion that sutures followers into machinic forms of loyalty. The essay situates these acts within a broader politics of sacrificial excess, linking them to hijra initiation, Mughal-coded sovereignty, and strategies of masculine containment. What emerges is a devotional regime of irreversible subtraction and a sovereignty staged through ritual overreach. Full article

This essay highlights Natchez, Mississippi’s Confederate heritage tourism to illustrate interrelationships between memory, history, and imagination, and how performed commemorations critically shape nationalist ideals and beliefs. Memories—and the bodies that pass them—shape the politically charged terrain of imagined nations, which are uncertain and collectively negotiated. To illustrate the contested nature of historical memory and how performing the past reimagines and reshapes the present and future nation, I juxtapose the Confederate Pageant’s nostalgic, rosy-tinted view of the Old South with examples of contemporary Black-centered commemorations and heritage tourism in Natchez. The dissonance and tension between these opposing forces illustrate interrelationships between memory and history, how these are critical to sustaining nationalism, and how performed commemorations of the past—whether historically accurate or imagined—critically shape ideals and beliefs about race and the nation. I use Natchez to undergird broad questions about the nature of memory and history, which are axiomatically contested and fallible. I use examples of Black commemoration in Natchez to illustrate antiracist theories of historiography. Full article

The Black Church has historically functioned as both a spiritual sanctuary and a catalyst for sociopolitical transformation within African American communities. This article investigates how ecclesiological identity has evolved in diaspora contexts, particularly through the lens of the African American experience. Tracing its roots from African spiritual traditions and the era of slavery, through emancipation, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement, to the digital age and megachurch phenomenon, the Black Church has continually adapted to shifting cultural, theological, and social landscapes. Using a multidisciplinary approach that includes historical theology, sociology, and cultural analysis, this study explores how these adaptations reveal an ecclesiology grounded in liberation, justice, and resilience. Theologically, this paper contends that the Black Church’s ecclesial model offers a prophetic and globally relevant witness that challenges systemic injustice while inspiring communal hope. In examining both past and present adaptations, the article contributes to broader conversations around diasporic faith identity, theological innovation, and the global role of the Black Church. Full article

One of the core sources for Christian justification or critique of social justice matters is the Bible. One would think that a leading historic Christian figure, like John Wesley, whose theology was closely bound to biblical interpretation, would have used the Bible extensively to argue against an important matter such as (anti-)slavery. However, we find that his argument lacks his usual biblical-centeredness. This article explores this phenomenon and attempts to understand Wesley’s reasoning and argument in light of his limited use of scripture in this instance. Full article

Creole writer Sidonie de la Houssaye (1820–1894) registered the threat of anglophone dominance after the Civil War on behalf of a host of characters drawn from the geographies and ideologies in and around her home in Louisiana. Her little-known literary tales depict the period as a cultural and linguistic border zone. In addition to the texture of Louisiana French and Creole heritage, the tales depict the vexed social dynamics of prejudice and fragility. In the context of this special issue on good and evil, the poorly known children’s tales offer insight into these pernicious tensions that persisted under the surface of moral victory after the Civil War. La Houssaye’s lessons for children take up the moral panic of a Louisiana reckoning with its legacies of racial violence and cultural erasure. This article argues that morality in these tales takes shape in interpersonal practices that can be learned to heal social ills. What I have called La Houssaye’s “ethics of social life” relies on education rather than condemnation to redefine human bonds. If a broader lesson emerges from the stories taken together, it suggests that structural change is slow to heal cultural wounds. We must ourselves be the agents of a healthier community. Full article