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A sweeping narrative history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.
 
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.
 
Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.
 
Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

Reimagining watersheds as living hydrocommons through which artists and communities create more just and sustainable futures

Hydrocommoning explores how artists, activists, and curators coalesce around water in embodied efforts to contest entrenched and enduring forms of harm and degradation. Against the reduction of rivers, streams, and wetlands to mere resources to be managed, Hydrocommoning centers water as a living web of relations through which artists and communities forge creative means of reconnection by moving, weaving, pumping, eating, and listening.

By charting these aesthetic practices, Hydrocommoning shows how artists and organizers across Latin America oppose extractivism, unequal urbanization, ecological degradation, and the erasure of Indigenous water cultures. To cultivate widespread social attunement to vulnerable waters and raise the call for their defense and care, collectives in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru engage in communal meals, sound art, infrastructural interventions, and other practices that Lisa Blackmore theorizes as “hydrocommoning.”

Grounded in five years of experiential fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects in Latin America, Blackmore proposes a methodology to work with water as an analytical framework for collective action. Bridging the gap between theory, curating, and community-based practices, Hydrocommoning offers a promising vision of grassroots organizing that actively confronts some of today’s most urgent ecological threats.

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