My work deals with the history and the memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery and their present social and cultural legacies. I am particularly interested in the public memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery, and have published numerous works on these issues. I conducted fieldwork and archival research in my home country Brazil, as well as in Benin, France, Canada, and the United States. My first first book, Romantisme tropical : l’aventure illustrée d’un peintre français au Brésil [Tropical Romanticism: The Illustrated Adventure of a French Painter in Brazil] (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008), was published in French. It examines the construction of a particular image of Brazil in nineteenth-century France. The book explores the various written and visual representations of natives and individuals of African descent (both enslaved, freed, and free), through the work of the French artist François-Auguste Biard (1799-1882), in particular his richly illustrated travelogue titled Deux Années au Brésil (1862).
My most recent book Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010) is a study of the recent phenomenon of memorialization of slavery in Brazil and Benin (West Africa). The book argues that the building of the public memory of slavery is not only the result of survivals from the period of the Atlantic slave trade but also the outcome of a transnational movement that was accompanied by the continuous intervention of institutions and individuals who promoted the relations between Brazil and the present-day Republic of Benin.
Over the last five years, I edited several books: Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery (2009 ), Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities (2011), and Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (2012). I also co-edited with Paul E. Lovejoy and Mariana P. Candido the volume Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora (2011). Presently, I am finishing a special issue “Brazilian Slavery and its Legacies” of the journal Luso-Brazilian Review and on two special issues titled ” “Atlantic Approaches on Slave Resistance in the Americas,” of the Journal of African Diaspora Archeology and Heritage.
Currently, I am working on several projects. The first is a book provisionally titled Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage and Slavery is a global study of the public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis, I argue that the rise of the transnational public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the public space is a movement based not only on historical and fictional narratives but also on images, widely disseminated through European travel accounts, photography, and film. By examining slavery images and slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the book aims at understanding how public initiatives (including monuments, memorials, and museum exhibitions) commemorating the Atlantic slave trade on the one hand largely relied on these earlier representations and on the other hand appropriate the representations of other atrocities, especially the Holocaust.
My second book project, Images of Slavery in the Americas, is a historical analysis of European and North American travelogues visual and written representations of slavery in the Americas from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. The monograph expands my previous work on slavery images of European travelogues of the nineteenth century and is aimed to provide historians with methodological instruments to interpret representations of slave life in the Americas.
Also, I have been working on a revised and expanded version of my book Romantisme tropical: l’aventure illustrée d’un peintre français au Brésil provisionally titled The Enemy of Brazil: A French Painter in the Tropics to be published in English and Portuguese.
Presently I am an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Howard University (Washington DC).