Black Latin America: Legacies of Slavery, Race, and African Culture
In this fifth and last special issue of the HAHR published under our editorial tenure at Yale, we turn to questions of slavery and race as well as the role of people of African descent in Latin American history. The history of black slavery and, subsequently, of race relations is an aspect of Latin American history that has become a central theme of scholarly activity and has made Latin American historiography increasingly relevant to scholars of other regions of the Americas. Since the days of Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1947), which itself drew on the work of Latin American scholars such as Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz, a comparative approach has, at least, implicitly framed much of the historiography of slavery, race, and racism in the Americas. The early comparisons were often based on a set of implicit epistemological assumptions: there were fundamental differences in the nature of modern race relations between Latin America and North America; variations in the patterns of slavery in the two regions were in some way responsible for the differences in race relations; and that religious, economic, cultural, and political factors determined the trajectory of race relations. In the last 40 years or so, a whole generation of world scholarship has struggled with these questions and challenged these earlier assumptions. These debates have made this one of the most active areas of research in Latin American history. Despite the comparative framework that often organized the research, much of the advancement in the study of these topics has been made in a national or regional context. During the 1960s–80s, national historiographies of slavery and race throughout the Americas developed and deepened, providing new perspectives on the colonial and national experiences of individual countries. Within their national focus, however, these studies were often implicitly informed by methods and techniques used by historians working in other contexts so that even at the local and national levels such studies were framed