Dr. Oscar de la Torre has received a 2014 fellowship of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. He will use the fellowship to finish his book manuscript “Leaving Behind the Big Snake: A History of Black Amazonia, 1850-1950”. The book is about the history of black rural communities in Amazonia, focusing on how enslaved Africans and Maroons used the eco-social characteristics of the region to dig their way out of slavery; and how they dialogued and competed with the elite and non-elite social groups to build a political identity that is rooted in their African ancestry. He will unfold the implications of these for black land ownership and citizenship in twentieth-century Brazil.
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