Abstract
In a 1998 article, Silvia H. Lara made a harsh critique regarding the exclusion of Black people, be them enslaved or free, from the history of labor in Brazil. Identified only with free and wage-earning labor, this history would have ignored the experiences and struggles of those workers before and after the abolition of slavery. Twenty years after the publication of this is critique, which has been highly influential among academia, our goal in the present article is to resume this questioning, trying to identify how and to what extent the demand for expanded dialogues was incorporated into the production of the Work Group Mundos do Trabalho (‘Worlds of Labor’), which is connected to Associação Nacional de História (‘National History Association’), and using as sources the production presented by the researches within this Work Group.
Keywords:
History of labor; Slavery; Freedom; Work Group Mundos do Trabalho