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Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-7683384

1527-5477

James P. Woodard,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

A decade ago the distinguished historian of Brazil Barbara Weinstein challenged Latin Americanists to “combine the ‘Indo’ and the ‘Afro’” in studies of the region’s postcolonial history. Yuko Miki’s Frontiers of Citizenship, though not initially conceived in response to that challenge, represents an endorsement of Weinstein’s program, as well as a major accomplishment for its author. Readers of Ethnohistory will find much to admire in its charting of the complex intersections of indigenous and diasporic peoples over the course of nineteenth-century Brazilian history, from early experiments in nation building through the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in its last New World redoubt, in 1888.The impact of these intersecting histories, Miki argues, echoed through the length of the continent-sized country into the twentieth century and on to our time, but their site—the site of the particular histories she documents—was much more limited. It consisted of what she calls the “Atlantic Frontier,” a Brazilian region south of the most successful experiments in colonial sugar-plantation agriculture, east of the mining zone that boomed for much of the eighteenth century, and north of Rio de Janeiro, the colonial and later national capital, and its growing plantation hinterland. This region remained largely uncolonized until the nineteenth century, and so, under the canopy of unspoiled Atlantic forest, at the jurisdictional intersection of three territorial units (after independence, in 1822, the provinces of Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo) were potentially rich lands to be exploited for the benefit of nation, settler, and state. The lands, though uncolonized, were not empty of human inhabitants, but rather were a haven to autonomous indigenous peoples, who would have to be dealt with in some way or another were the lands to be settled by Brazilians and by European immigrants. At the same time, in nineteenth-century Brazilian terms at least, effective settlement and exploitation meant the expansion of the country’s most genuinely national institution, chattel slavery, however much some statesmen might have wished otherwise.And so the stage was set for the stories Miki tells so well, over six chapters, drawing on multiple archives and an array of published sources. Her first chapter explains how the settlement of the Atlantic Frontier and its incorporation into effectively national territory produced patterns of exclusion and exploitation, including the introduction of large numbers of African slaves alongside the renewal, on fresh ground, of Indian slavery, as the people outsiders called Botocudo were subject to “just war” (from 1808) and legal enslavement (until 1831), while the traffic in native peoples, especially children, continued for decades thereafter. Chapter 2 explores black and indigenous struggles for—variously—freedom, autonomy, and inclusion in and around the Atlantic Frontier, while chapter 3 steps back, charting how a nineteenth-century “extinction discourse” regarding native peoples took shape at the national level—according to which the Botocudo and kindred groups were fast becoming extinct—and how this discourse prefigured subsequent discourses regarding the anticipated disappearance of “blacks” from Brazil, an interesting connection unacknowledged in the considerable literature on Brazilian racial thought. The three remaining chapters return to the Atlantic Frontier, with some elapsed time in the interim: the focus is now on the 1870s and especially the 1880s, as the slow ending of Brazilian slavery heightened local tensions, even as manifestations of these tensions (differential treatment of anti-indigenous and antiblack crime, slave appropriation of local geography, increased settler interest in indigenous labor, and different kinds of abolitionism) are taken to be characteristic of larger struggles over nationhood, territory, and citizenship. An epilogue offers an explication of the project’s origins (it was inspired by archival findings rather than in direct response to Weinstein’s challenge, though Weinstein was a mentor to the author, and the published version of her call is cited in the notes, as it could not but be).Summary scarcely does justice to such a fine first book, which will be of great interest to historians of slavery, frontier settlement, and the native peoples of the Americas, as well as historians of Brazil generally. Some readers will find that the idea of citizenship scarcely bears the load it is asked to carry, as an underexamined organizing conceit stretched through chapters that stand up on their own, but that is little matter. Miki’s carefully told stories of the intersections of black and indigenous experiences across a formative period in the history of the largest of Latin American countries, the historical meaning of these stories, and their potential conceptual impact are what make this book so worthwhile.