1 - Assembling an Afro-Brazilian Economy

Summary

This introductory chapter unpacks and integrates the study’s key concepts, theories, and fields to situate the analyses laid out in subsequent chapters. It devotes detailed attention to the inextricable and co-constitutive relationships linking societies, environments, and power. It connects Afro-Brazilian cultures with the myths of racial democracy that helped to shape their emergence in the twentieth century. It discusses concepts of cultural landscapes within economies of transatlantic exchange, and links theories of relational power with Afro-Brazilian resistance and environmental change. It frames the colonial plantation and its monocultures as the ongoing socioecological framework of coloniality, in contrast to the complex biodiverse palm oil landscapes of Northeast Brazil. Along the way, the chapter introduces the real and conceptual places involved in the study, and their interrelations, especially Bahia, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora. It concludes with a discussion of methods and methodology and an outline of the book’s structure.