PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Merle L. Bowen is Associate Professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique.
'For Land and Liberty shows the foundational importance of land rights to black citizenship in Brazil. With an unflinching gaze, Bowen demonstrates the dispossession of rural black communities by powerful rural and state interests since the time of slavery, and compellingly argues that land rights are a necessary form of reparations for past injustices, and to achieve justice today. Deeply researched and timely, this work illuminates the unfinished struggle for liberation in Brazil and the African diaspora.' Yuko Miki, Fordham University 'Quilombola - the formation of fugitive slave communities - is a storied part of the struggle of enslaved Africans in the Americas for self-emancipation, nowhere more so than in Brazil. For Land and Liberty is a deeply researched meditation on the afterlives of Quilombola in contemporary Brazil. With its rural, land, and labor focus, yoked to the theme of self-emancipation, then and now, the book does double duty as a paradigm-shifting work on the origins and evolution of pan-Africanism. A stellar accomplishment.' Michael West, Pennsylvania State University
