In After Palmares, Marc A. Hertzman tells the rise, fall, and afterlives of Palmares, one of history’s largest and longest-lasting maroon societies. Forged during the seventeenth century by formerly enslaved Africans in what would become northeast Brazil, Palmares stood for a century, withstanding sustained attacks from two European powers. In 1695, colonial forces assassinated its most famous leader, Zumbi. Hertzman examines the remarkable ways that Palmares and its inhabitants lived on after Zumbi’s death, creating vivid portraits of those whose lives and voices scholars have often assumed are inaccessible. With an innovative approach to African languages, and paying close attention to place as well as African and diasporic spiritual beliefs, Hertzman reshapes our understanding of Palmares and Zumbi and advances a new framework for studying fugitive slave communities and marronage in the African diaspora.

Marc A. Hertzman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  xi
A Note on Language  xvii
Chronology  xxiii
Introduction. Layered Diasporas  1
I. War and Conquest
1. March 21, 1645  23
2. Before He Died, I Killed Zumbi  54
II. Spirits
3. Whose Confusion?  83
4. Flying Home?  107
III. People
5. Pedro, Paula, and the Refugees  129
6. The Powerful and the Almost Powerful  151
7. The “Indians of Palmares”  168
IV. Places
8. Greater Palmares  191
9. Farther North  214
V. Deaths and Rebirths
10. Killing Zumbi (Again)  239
11. Connected and Beyond  261
Conclusion. Tapera dos Palmares  280
Appendix A. A Latin Americanist Introduction to Africanist Comparative Historical Linguistics  299
Appendix B. Supplemental List of Sources  307
Notes  313
Bibliography  379
Index