Religion and Resistance in an Atlantic Biography

highlighted by the authors as a choice — one made in the context of a numerically significant, but frequently persecuted larger African community in late-slave-trade-era Brazil. The Story of Rufino uses a life history — exceptional as it was — to illuminate a broader story about the centrality of African slavery and slave trading to economy of the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic. His ‘ reverse ’ diasporic journey, from the slaving ships of Brazil to colonial Sierra Leone demonstrates the multidirectionality of the lives of many Africans uprooted in the slave trade, in this he was unusual but not completely unique. 3 Unlike other African diaspora intellectuals such as Domingos Álvares, who contested the hegemony of Atlantic slavery and empire, Reis, dos Santos Gomes, and de Carvalho trace the contradictions of Abundcare ’ s politics. He labored and invested in the transatlantic slave trade, while embracing a religious community which Brazilian political elites feared would under-mine their Christianized slaveholding society. His activities made him vulnerable to police harassment, but he seemingly never embraced open rebellion against the state ’ s authority like other enslaved and freed Africans. His ‘ accommodations ’ to Brazil ’ s slavocracy strikingly illustrate transatlantic slaving ’ s hegemonic power, even for people violently dispossessed by the traffic.