The Black Studies Speaker Series Presents: Dr. Adam Bledsoe

In the Northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, the Bay of Aratu has existed as a site of Black conviviality for more than a century. The communities of Ilha de Mare, Alto do Tororo, and Rio dos Macacos trace their origins back to ancestors who labored on, and in some cases escaped from, various plantations in the region, creating ways of life that both stewarded and relied upon the mangroves, forests, rivers, and shoals in the Bay. By the mid-20th century, the communities' traditional territories had become the targets of a network of development projects aimed at modernizing the state of Bahia and the Brazilian Northeast. These projects brought disaster to the communities and forced them into new modes of mobilization that nonetheless relied on traditional, ancestral knowledges and territorial practices. This talk discusses the histories of these communities, the cosmologies that organize Afro-Brazilian territorialities, and the modes of refusal that Rio dos Macacos, Alto do Tororo, and Ilha de Mare employ to avoid present-day forms of capture.