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4 - Motherhood Silenced

Enslaved Wet Nurses in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

from Part I - Law, Precarity, and Affective Economies during Brazil’s Slave Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

Brodwyn Fischer
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Keila Grinberg
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Summary

This chapter contributes to debates about the relational dynamics of Brazilian slavery, focusing especially on enslaved wet nurses. While the relationships between masters and slaves in the private sphere did involve affection and loyalty, they were also gestated in an environment of abuse, humiliation, and physical and symbolic violence, all of which were essential features of slavery as an institution. Interactions that might be read initially as paradoxical or ambiguous were in fact constitutive of slavery’s ideology of domination, experienced and enacted in various ways by both masters and slaves. The figure of the wet nurse and the practice of relegating breastfeeding to enslaved women – which was generalized among Brazil’s dominant classes during the Empire – helped to forge a slavocratic habitus, a kind of second nature, in which future masters experienced the social relationships of slavery within their intimate circles and everyday lives from a very tender age. This chapter analyzes these domestic and extremely conflictual interactions as an integral part of the slave system, critical to the symbolic and social reproduction of Brazil’s master class.

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The Boundaries of Freedom
Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil
, pp. 108 - 127
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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