Kathleen J. Higgins is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa, USA.
“[A] ‘must-read’ for all those interested in the African Diaspora
and Brazilian slavery.”—Mary Karasch,Oakland University
“The author examines diverse secular and ecclesiastical
administrative sources . . . to portray the social world of the
slaves and slave owners of a typical 18th-century mining town, with
special focus on religion, patterns of work, and relations between
masters and slaves and men and women. Higgins is very attentive to
the structural possibilities and limits on people’s lives,
emphasizing how these differed according to age, sex, race, ability
and historical circumstances.”—British Bulletin of Publications On
Latin America, Carribbean, Portugal and Spain
“This well-documented book will be widely read not only by
historians and students of colonial Brazil but also by a wide range
of scholars of New World slave systems and race relations. It will
aptly be adopted as a textbook not only for graduate seminars on
comparative slavery but also for many undergraduate courses in
Brazilian and Latin America history and the African Diaspora
studies, in which students will enjoy and learn from the book
together with the illuminating Brazilian movie: Xica da Silva.
‘Licentious Liberty’ indeed helps us understand in what
circumstances this ambitious slave woman became a concubine for a
Portuguese diamond from Lisbon in early eighteenth-century Minas
Gerais.”—Mieko Nishida The Americas
“This is a challenging work that addresses significant questions,
pushes our discussion about gender and slavery in colonial Brazil
further, and expands our knowledge of the social history of
Brazil’s mining communities. It fills in an important chapter in
the history of colonial Brazil.”—Donald Ramos Luso-Brazilian
Review
“Kathleen Higgins’ Licentious Liberty is thoroughly researched in
Minas archives, and the author also assiduously takes up
comparisons and theoretical debates, generally in the extensive
footnotes. She makes a solid case for the inclusion of gender in
the analysis of slave societies, both for masters and among the
servile population. . . . Licentious Liberty would be a useful
addition to the readings in a course on slavery or colonial Brazil
or on gender in colonial Latin America.”—David McCreery Journal of
Latin American Studies
“Focusing on Sabará, one of the principal mining towns, she draws a
compelling portrait of the disorderly society generated by
dispersed placer gold production.”—Hendrik Kraay Latin American
Research Review
“This book is a careful examination of how slavery worked in one of
the societies of the New World most influenced by that institution.
Higgins not only is sensitive to the ironies of the institution,
but above all she pays attention to the way in which slaves
responded to their situation and struggled to shape their own
lives. We now have a book on slavery in the mining areas to match
the studies done on plantation zones. It is sure to become a base
point for future discussions of slavery in Minas Gerais.”—Stuart
Schwartz,Yale University
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