GLC@Lunch: Cassia Roth “Black Nurse, White Milk: Slavery and the Politics of Breastfeeding in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil”

This presentation looks at advertisements for enslaved wet nurses in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It analyzes an original dataset of advertisements in the city’s main commercial newspaper, the Jornal do Commercio, from 1827 (its first year of publication) to 1888 (final abolition). In it, I argue that enslaved wet nurses had to deny the physical and social reproductive needs of their own families to satisfy those of their owners’, thus engaging in what I term “disembodied reproduction.” Enslaved wet nurses are examples of the productive-reproductive paradigm that defines Atlantic World slavery.