Research Projects

• Blacks of the Rosary by Elizabeth W. Kiddy
• Tuxtlas Corridor Project
• Albright Professor Studies Tango in Buenos Aires

From 1996 to 2003 I engaged in research in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on the lay religious brotherhoods of blacks.  I found a tradition that was both historically rooted and deeply felt.  Below is a description of the book, links to Penn State Press, and the review in the American Historical Review.  I have also included some photos that I took while doing the research.  Feel free to contact me with any questions about the book, the research, and/or the communities of congadeiros.

Blacks of the Rosary
Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

By Elizabeth W. Kiddy

October 2005 | 6 x 9
328 pages | 8 illustrations/5 maps

Hardback: $55.00 SH | 978-0-271-02693-0

Available March 2007:
Paperback: $27.00 SH | 978-0-271-02694-7

Blacks of the Rosary tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian communities that developed within lay religious brotherhoods dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas Gerais. It shows how these brotherhoods functioned as a social space in which Africans and their descendants could rebuild a communal identity based on a shared history of an African past and an ongoing devotional practice, thereby giving rise to enduring transnational cultures that have survived to the present day.

In exploring this intersection of community, identity, and memory, the book probes the Portuguese and African contributions to the brotherhoods in Part One. Part Two traces the changes and continuities within the organizations from the early eighteenth century to the end of the Brazilian Empire, and the book concludes in Part Three with discussion of the twentieth-century brotherhoods and narratives of the participants in brotherhood festivals in the 1990s.

In a larger sense, the book serves as a case study through which readers can examine the strategies that Afro-Brazilians used to create viable communities in order to confront the asymmetry of power inherent in the slave societies of the Americas and their economic and social marginalization in the twentieth century.

• Blacks of the Rosary page@ Penn State Press
  
  
• The American Historical Review review of Blacks of the Rosary

Images from Professor Kiddy's research
click on any thumbmail below to view a larger size