In the initial pages of this book, a translation of Devotos da Cor: identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão, published in Brazil in 2000, Mariza de Carvalho Soares describes her encounter with a copy of a document written in 1786 entitled “Statutes of the Congregation of the Minas Makii Blacks in Rio de Janeiro,” a set of narratives that describe the West African Coast as well as the administrative and devotional practices of the African slaves who belonged to a lay Catholic organization in Rio known as the Mahi Congregation. The six chapters that follow comprise Soares's various contextualizations of this and other records of Catholic brotherhoods, executed with both grace and rigor, that take the reader from Africa to the city of Rio de Janeiro, capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, and, finally, to one of that city's cemeteries. Along the way she proposes a new conceptualization of diasporic identity and challenges scholars to think in more complex ways about both rupture and continuity within the vast history of Africans in the slave trade and slavery in the Americas.

At the end of the seventeenth-century the slave trade and a new gold mining economy in the hinterland north of Rio converged and transformed each other. As the crown struggled to ensure both the supply of slaves to the mines and that gold used to finance the trade would not go untaxed, in the mid-1720s almost 6,000 slaves from the part of Western Africa that the Portuguese called the “Mina coast” arrived annually at Rio's port. Who were these people? A diverse group, Soares makes clear, that included the Mahi, Gbe speakers from the hinterland of the Bight of Benin north of the Kingdom of Dahomey who traders and slave owners in Brazil identified as members of the Mina “nation.” While the Mina were a relatively small part of the African population in colonial Brazil, in the eighteenth century their numbers increased so that they provided a significant amount of labor even in Rio where, historians have argued, most slaves were from Angola. Here, as Soares explains, she is most interested in “those born beyond the reach of Portuguese colonial society, who arrived in Brazil by ship, and who were categorized there on the basis of a presumed nation or provenience group” (69). As her extensive analysis of baptismal and manumission records also reveals, in Brazil references to African slaves as “heathen” (gentio) gave way to a “secularized” language of identification that recognized “nation” (nação), a term that referred to “people who occupied a given territory, and a shared language, laws, customs and systems of governance” (75). Yet it is “provenience,” she argues, that is the most productive category of analysis for a study of African slaves in Brazil because it attends to “geographical routes of displacement.” As Soares also asserts, such a study should not dwell upon cultural and religious origins, purity, and authenticity because a recuperation or reconstruction of the past was impossible. Thus, while proveniences “refer to names of the places or social groups from which African people were taken as slaves by the various agencies involved in the trade” and that “might or might not have a relation with local realities,” recognition of provenience groups illuminates the complex processes by which Africans “organized themselves around them” and forged “new forms of social organization” in the diaspora where local experiences were paramount (85–86). The Mina of Rio de Janeiro were not, therefore, the same as the Mina in Bahia.

In the second half of the book, Soares examines these processes in the urban space of Rio de Janeiro as the city itself was transformed from a rather impoverished backwater to an important port and capital of the colony. Geographical and temporal scales of analysis narrow because it was out of “the immediate conditions of captivity” that new social, cultural, and religious experiences and identities emerged (88–89). And lay Catholic organizations such as the Mahi Congregation together with a number of other brotherhoods were important features of these conditions. Building on earlier scholarship on the ways in which African and slave brotherhoods fostered social and cultural solidarities, Soares examines the experiences of the Mina and Mahi, freed and slave, in the church of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia. Charity, devotion, public rituals, and festivities delineated in foundational documents and dutifully performed constituted diasporic community. As Soares poignantly suggests, such communal life offered other, more specific, forms of security too. In a society that subjected enslaved Africans' bodies to repeated violations in life, “belonging to a brotherhood was perhaps the only resource available to slaves and freed blacks hoping to escape the ignoble anonymity of mass graves for a socially recognized Christian burial” (137). Thus, members of brotherhoods anticipated death by recording assets that were to be bequeathed to the brotherhood and a testament that indicated where they wanted to buried and in what attire.

Soares also analyzes the record of conflict within lay organizations and the hierarchies enacted in public festivals and rites of leadership succession. Her close reading of the Mahi Manuscript in particular sheds light on how these organizations provided venues in which ethnic and religious differences were defined and defended and that, in turn, justified the boundaries of these organizations themselves. In the late eighteenth century, she concludes, a “Catholic Mahi identity was constructed in opposition to a heathen Benin” and to the slave and freed “Angolans” in Rio de Janeiro who the Mahi regarded as perpetuating pagan rites (220). As Soares also notes, pointing to other areas of inquiry, Mahi identity was dynamic and one of many within the complex society of Rio de Janeiro that also encompassed Brazilian-born slaves who forged their own social and religious practices. With its innovative theoretical synthesis and extensive recourse to archival and printed sources, this book will be of interest to scholars of slavery, the African diaspora, and religious practice.