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Tornando-se livre: Agentes históricos e lutas sociais no processo de abolição

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3934024

1527-1900

Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto,

Urban Development and Societal Issues

Freedom as a problem, or the problem of freedom: these are two related ways of presenting a key question about the formation of Brazil and other American societies founded on slavery. The subtle difference between the two formulations lies in what is projected into the horizon and what is understood as reality, even if that freedom is marked by an inherent precariousness. Between the two, there is the process of “becoming free.” The collection of articles edited by Maria Helena Machado and Celso Thomas Castilho is oriented around this aspect.A product of cooperation between the University of São Paulo and Vanderbilt University, the book presents a historiographical balance fostered by the 125 years since the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In this sense, the collection offers a sampling of the broad reassessment that has been promoted in the social and political history of slavery and abolition, which a few years ago also resulted in the three-volume Histórias do pós-abolição no mundo Atlântico, edited by Hebe Mattos, Martha Abreu, Carolina Dantas, Beatriz Loner, and Karl Monsma.Tornando-se livre asserts its originality by bringing together works that center on problems related to the dynamics of acquiring freedom and its limits, mostly within the context of slavery but also after slavery. The book above all incorporates experiences before Brazil abolished slavery on May 13, 1888, but it also includes some postabolition experiences. This is because, as highlighted by the editors, studies focused on postemancipation reference their origins in research on slavery, especially those concerned with the so-called agency of people subject to this compulsory labor system, though not necessarily unpaid. How this influences the material produced becomes clear when one considers the sources consulted by the researchers, the questions that they formulated, and the subjects that they prioritized for analysis. Enslaved people, freedmen and freedwomen, and “libertandos” (a word employed to designate certain individuals subjected to ambiguous labor regimes) are the main characters in a great number of the articles, followed by masters, abolitionists, and others present at a moment marked by a fluidity between slavery and freedom.While research on the generations of free black families during the period of slavery was not incorporated into the volume, the quality of the book remains uncompromised, since it would be impossible to take into account all the multiple topics that have been established in the research field in any one text. The collection's 21 articles are distributed along four thematic axes and include discussions that go beyond the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to cover experiences in the southern and northern provinces of the country, as well as in Salvador and Recife.The first part is dedicated to the initiatives undertaken by the enslaved themselves and by freedmen and libertandos in the sense of dealing with available ways to access the free world and confronting the strategies of control to which they were subject via the ambiguous forms of labor operating in the nineteenth century, including the rent and service provision contracts instituted in the 1830s. The second part addresses the particularities of accessing freedom for the enslaved and libertandas as women and mothers. The role that they played in protecting the bonds with their children and other relatives and how the feminine condition influenced disputes with masters and employers demonstrate the relevance and urgency of further research that takes into account gender relations during and after slavery in Brazil. This most certainly implies thinking about internal conflicts within the enslaved and freed communities.The book's third and most substantial thematic axis concerns the emancipation and abolitionist movements in Brazil during the second half of the nineteenth century. In general terms, the section addressing this theme attempts to map other subjects that push forward the debate on “abolitionisms,” in the plural. The contributors here show a marked interest in the acts of individuals and groups from the popular sectors who were also involved in other fronts of political action, such as worker associations. The last section considers the experience of abolition in Brazil via the action of subjects who operated from a transnational perspective, emphasizing the views of black and white individuals from the United States regarding the events in Brazil and other South American countries.Tornando-se livre thus establishes itself as a good reference and an inspiration for further research concerning the history of slavery and access to freedom in Brazil and elsewhere.