My award-winning book, For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is a comparative study of the history and contemporary circumstances concerning Brazil’s quilombos (African-descent rural communities) and their inhabitants, the quilombolas. The book examines the disposition of quilombola claims to land as a site of contestation over citizenship and its meanings for Afro-descendants, as well as their connections to the broader fight against racism. The book 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. This work illuminates the unfinished struggle for liberation in Brazil and the African diaspora.

Building on earlier work in Mozambique and Brazil, my new research project is a study of Black rural communities in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia and their protracted struggle for land, livelihood, and citizenship rights. It aims to create new narratives of Black rural community life in Canada by analyzing the diverse experiences of people of African descent and by situating them as speakers and agents of their own lives. By looking at land and labor, the study will bring to light untold stories of African Nova Scotian ingenuity and resilience. The book project uses the diasporic Canadian Atlantic as an empirical and theoretical framework to extend the geographical scope of the African diaspora.