Chica Da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century

J nia Ferreira Furtado offers a fascinating study of the world of a freed woman of color in a small Brazilian town where itinerant merchants, former slaves, Portuguese administrators, and concubines interact across social and cultural lines. The child of an African slave from the Costa da Mina and a Brazilian military nobleman of Portuguese descent, Chica da Silva won her freedom using social and matrimonial strategies. But the story of Chica da Silva is not merely the personal history of a woman, or the social history of a colonial Brazilian town. Rather, it provides a historical perspective on a woman's agency, the cultural universe she inhabited, and the myths that were created around her in subsequent centuries, as Chica de Silva came to symbolize both an example of racial democracy and the stereotype of licentiousness and sensuality always attributed to the black or mulatta female in the Brazilian popular imagination.


About the Author
Furtado, Júnia Ferreira: - Junia Furtado holds a Ph.D. in Social History from the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. She is currently a Professor of History at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Her work on Chica da Silva has won awards from the Carlos Chagas Foundation for Women and Gender Research and the Ford Foundation. She has also contributed articles to Cartografia da conquista das minas and History of Cartography, Volume 4. The Portuguese language edition of this book was awarded Honorable Mention in 2004 by the Casa de las Américas foundation of Cuba.