Hispanic, Latin American and Portuguese Studies

Bloomsbury Cultural History

Subjects covered include: Animals • Business • Childhood and Family • Death • Dress and Fashion • Food • Furniture • Gardens • Human Body • Law • Medicine • Money • Peace • Plants • Religion in the West • Senses • Sexuality • Shopping • Sport • Theatre • Work • Women.

Screen Studies

Screenplays and scholarly books on many aspects of screen studies, including histories of film and technical manuals.

Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America

In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche presents the reader with the complex landscape of art and literature among Afro-Hispanic and Latin artists. Branche and his contributors describe individuals such as Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote an autobiography on the slave experience in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The reader finds a thriving Afro-Hispanic theatrical presence throughout Latin America and even across the Atlantic. The role of black women in poetry and literature comes to the forefront in the Caribbean, presenting a powerful reminder of the diversity that defines the region. All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.

Black in Latin America

12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest--over ten and a half million--were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms.

Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600-2000

Of the almost 11 million Africans who came to the Americas between 1500 and 1870, two-thirds came to Spanish America and Brazil. Over four centuries, Africans and their descendants-both free and enslaved-participated in the political, social, and cultural movements that indelibly shaped their countries' colonial and post-independence pasts. Yet until very recently Afro-Latin Americans were conspicuously excluded from narratives of their hemisphere's history. George Reid Andrews seeks to redress this damaging omission by making visible the past and present lives and labors of black Latin Americans in their New World home.

Frontiers of Citizenship: a black and indigenous history of postcolonial Brazil

Frontiers of Citizenship is an engagingly-written, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and the origins of Brazil's 'racial democracy'. Through groundbreaking archival research that brings the stories of slaves, Indians, and settlers to life, Yuko Miki challenges the widespread idea that Brazilian Indians 'disappeared' during the colonial era, paving the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation.

Freedom's Captives: slavery and gradual emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

Freedom's Captives is a compelling exploration of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Pacific coast of Colombia, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent. From the autonomous rainforests and gold mines of the Colombian Black Pacific, Yesenia Barragan rethinks the nineteenth-century project of emancipation by arguing that the liberal freedom generated through gradual emancipation constituted a modern mode of racial governance that birthed new forms of social domination, while temporarily instituting de facto slavery.

Modernity in Black and White: art and image, race and identity in Brazil, 1890-1945

Modernity in Black and White provides a groundbreaking account of modern art and modernism in Brazil. Departing from previous accounts, mostly restricted to the elite arenas of literature, fine art and architecture, the book situates cultural debates within the wider currents of Brazilian life. From the rise of the first favelas, in the 1890s and 1900s, to the creation of samba and modern carnival, over the 1910s and 1920s, and tracking the expansion of mass media and graphic design, into the 1930s and 1940s, it foregrounds aspects of urban popular culture that have been systematically overlooked.

Thinking Black: Britain 1964-1985

It was a common charge among black radicals in the 1960s that Britons needed to start "thinking black." As state and society consolidated around a revived politics of whiteness, "thinking black," they felt, was necessary for all who sought to build a liberated future out of Britain's imperial past. In Thinking Black, Rob Waters reveals black radical Britain's wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. He shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain.

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics.

Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location

This book explores the mechanisms through which 'African literature', as a market category, has been consecrated within the global literary field. Drawing on archival, textual and field-based research, it proposes that the normative story of African literary writing has functioned to efface a broader material history of African literary production located on and oriented to the continent itself.

Staying Power: the history of Black people in Britain

Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. First published in 1984 amid race riots and police brutality, Fryer's history performed a deeply political act, revealing how Africans, Asians, and their descendants had been erased from British history.

Infamous Bodies: early Black women's celebrity and the afterlives of rights

The countless retellings and reimaginings of the private and public lives of Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta have transformed them into difficult cultural and black feminist icons. In Infamous Bodies, Samantha Pinto explores how histories of these black women and their ongoing fame generate new ways of imagining black feminist futures.

Feminism, interrupted: disrupting power

Plastered over t-shirts and tote bags, the word 'feminist' has entered the mainstream and is fast becoming a popular slogan for our generation. But feminism isn't a commodity up for purchase; it's a weapon for fighting against injustice.

This revolutionary book reclaims feminism from consumerism through exploring state violence against women, reproductive justice, transmisogyny, sex work, gendered Islamophobia and much more, showing that the struggle for gendered liberation is a struggle for justice, one that can transform the world for everybody.

Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman: Black history and poetics in performance

In a gathering of griot traditions fusing storytelling, cultural history, and social and literary criticism, Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman "re-members" and represents how women of the African diaspora have drawn on ancient traditions to record memory, history, and experience in performance.  These women's songs and dances provide us with a wealth of polyphonic text that records their reflections on identity, imagination, and agency, providing a collective performed autobiography that complements the small body of pre-twentieth-century African and African American women's writing.

The Persistence of Memory: remembering slavery in Liverpool, 'slaving capital of the world'

The Persistence of Memory is a history of the public memory of transatlantic slavery in the largest slave-trading port city in Europe, from the end of the 18th century into the 21st century; from history to memory. Mapping this public memory over more than two centuries reveals the ways in which dissonant pasts, rather than being "forgotten histories", persist over time as a contested public debate.

NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement

As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund 'space joyrides' rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA's goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. It provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.

Afropean: notes from Black Europe

Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty per cent Muslim. Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.

Slavery and Bristol

This book is broken down into five sections. Section one: A brief history of how most societies have chosen to embrace slavery, how Europeans became increasingly involved in enslaving Africans, and Bristol's early connections with the slave trade up to 1700, including the role of the Merchant Venturers. Section two: A first-hand and at times harrowing account of what it was like to be enslaved, written in 1796 by Olaudah Equiano. Section three: Bristol's so-called 'golden age' in the eighteenth century when it was at the forefront of Britain's involvement in the slave trade. Section four: How a dedicated group of individuals fought for the abolition of slavery and the struggle that generated in Bristol. The final section shows how slavery survived its abolition and generated a racism that is still far too prevalent. It examines events such as the Bristol Bus Boycott, the St Paul's riots and, most recently, the Black Lives Matter protest.

Black Historical Newspapers

Essential primary source content and editorial perspectives of the most distinguished African American newspapers in the U.S. Each of the ten Historical Black Newspapers provides researchers with unprecedented access to perspectives and information that was excluded or marginalized in mainstream sources. The content, including articles, obituaries, photos, editorials, and more, is easily accessible for scholars in the study of the history of race relations, journalism, local and national politics, education, African American studies, and many multidisciplinary subjects.

Empire Online

This project has been developed to encourage undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and researchers to explore colonial history, politics, culture and society. Material in the collection spans five centuries, charting the story of the rise and fall of empires; from the explorations of Columbus, Captain Cook, and others, right through to de-colonisation in the second half of the twentieth century and debates over American Imperialism.