Dissertation Defense: Victoria Broadus
Candidate: Victoria Broadus
Major: History
Advisor: Bryan McCann, Ph.D.
Title: Vissungo: The Afro-Descended Culture of Miners and Maroons in Brazil’s Diamond District, 1850S-2020S
For a nearly a century and a half — from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth — diamonds from the northern region of Minas Gerais, Brazil, dominated the world diamond market. That industry depended on the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, and many thousands of Africans were brought into the diamond region surrounding Diamantina through the mid-nineteenth century. Quilombo (maroon) communities proliferated through that century as well, taking advantage of privileged knowledge of diamond deposits to survive. After abolition in 1888, most of those African and Afro-descended miners stayed in the region, continuing to mine for diamonds using the same techniques that had been in use for centuries in a post-abolition context marked by profound continuities. This dissertation traces the history of the enslaved Africans and their descendants who mined for those diamonds; the Afrodescended culture they cultivated and passed down; and the ethnographers and folklorists who captured that culture for their own purposes in Depression-era Brazil. That Afro-descended culture of the diamond miners and maroons of northern Minas is most powerfully encapsulated and expressed in the vissungo verses they sang up to the late twentieth century and even beyond. Those verses, recorded by folklorists in the 1930s and 1940s still in predominantly West Central African language, represent a window into the local culture and cosmology. Like the vissungo language itself, or língua, that broader culture – which I call vissungo culture — cannot be understood without deep investigation of the West Central African understandings and practices that inform it. The culture reveals the profound resilience of West Central African understandings and practices to respond to oppressive conditions in the interior mountains and tablelands of Minas Gerais. Those understandings were shared and transmitted by the communities of enslaved, escaped, freed, and free Africans and descendants who survived by mining for diamonds in the local streams and rivers up through the late twentieth century. In the 1930s and 1940s, two key intellectuals – the linguist and ethnographer Aires da Mata Machado Filho and the musicologist Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo — captured vissungo verses as part of a larger depression-era push to document folk culture. This dissertation considers the motivations and meaning of those projects alongside the evolution of vissungo culture itself from slavery to post-abolition. It reveals the remarkable endurance of West Central African understandings and approaches to life and the universe in this interior region of Brazil, demanding that we rethink our understandings of the Black Atlantic and Black Brazil; it meanwhile probes the ways vissungo documentation projects inserted vissungos and vissungo culture into debates surrounding Black Brazil and a modern Brazilian identity.