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Marcelo D’Salete. Cumbe.Marcelo D’Salete. Angola Janga: Uma história de Palmares.

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 125; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/rhz1314

1937-5239

Flávio dos Santos Gomes,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Graphic novels and historical imagination, connected. In Cumbe and Angola Janga: Uma história de Palmares, these are the main ingredients that the artist and art historian Marcelo D'Salete uses to reconstruct quilombos in Brazil. In the Americas, over the course of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, enslaved men and women escaped and formed a vast number of communities that have reproduced themselves from the post-abolition period until the present day. They have received many names: cumbes in Venezuela, maroons in the British and U.S. Caribbean, marronage in the French Caribbean, and cimarronaje in Cuba and the Spanish Caribbean (Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd. ed. [1979]). In Brazil, they were initially called mocambos and later quilombos, African terms that meant "camps" in many micro and collective societies in the central-western region of Africa. We still know very little about what the fugitives called themselves and even less about the reason for the widespread use of the names mocambos/quilombos in Brazil, unlike the terms found in other areas colonized by Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain, which also imported Africans from the central-western region, and where fugitive communities were found. One explanation could be the dissemination of the uses and meanings of these terminologies through the Portuguese government. The terms in question may have been used to characterize both military strategies in precolonial Africa as well as those involved in resistance to slavery in Portuguese America. Many colonial officials in Brazil had previously been stationed in Asia and Africa, as administrative agents were transferred throughout the Portuguese Empire. They may have been referring to different things—military/POW camps in Central Africa or maroon communities in Brazil—but giving them similar names. African words may have been translated into the language and paperwork of the colonial government. Furthermore, many military men who served in Africa also had experience in Brazil, fighting Dutch invaders, joining anti-mocambo expeditions, and capturing Amerindians (see Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Mocambos e quilombos: Uma história do campesinato negro no Brasil [2015], and Gomes, Maria Helena P. T. Machado, and Marilia B. A. Ariza, "Quilombos," in Trevor Burnard, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History [2019]). In any event, the term quilombo only begins to appear in the Brazilian records in the late seventeenth century. Generally speaking, the most frequently used term before then was mocambo (Stuart B. Schwartz, "Mocambos, quilombos e palmares: A resistência escrava no Brasil colonial," Estudos Econômicos [São Paulo] 17, special issue [1987]: 61–88). An important innovation in the first graphic novel published by D'Salete, originally in 2014, is its title—Cumbe—not necessarily mentioning the hemispheric dimension of maroon communities and their identifying nomenclatures (cumbe, in Venezuela) but above all the African dimensions, a theme he explores in his two books.