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The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-10829283

1558-1454

Patricia Acerbi,

History of Colonial Brazil

The study of Brazilian slavery and abolition has expanded considerably in the last few decades, with important conclusions that develop our understanding of citizenship and freedom. The Boundaries of Freedom is edited by historians Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg, who have written key works on postabolition citizenship, slavery, and the law. Here they provide in English scholarship from Brazilian historians who usually write in Portuguese. The “Brazilian School” of slavery, central to the study of Atlantic slavery, offers new discussions on geography, land use, identity, subjectivity, family relationships, and the diverse forms of enslavement and work that resulted from Brazil's gradual approach to abolition. The authors illustrate the social, cultural, and political dimensions surrounding gradual abolition and how the periodic reorganizing of slave structures resulted in new “boundaries of freedom” that property owners sought to control and enslaved and formerly enslaved persons to rewrite.In the United States, Rebecca Scott's 1988 edited volume The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil and her 2000 edited volume Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies critically marked the study of the postabolition period as an extension of the slave experience that questioned the meanings of freedom. The editors of The Boundaries of Freedom situate the book within this historiography, collecting articles that explore classic debates in Brazilian historiography, highlighting how freedom was in constant dialogue with shifting slave-based arrangements. The volume's introduction is a superb historiographical essay on slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, with direct theoretical connections to the articles. Gradual abolition in Brazil, starting with the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1831 and again in 1850, then the freeing of enslaved women's wombs in 1871, and the final abolition of slavery in 1888, resulted in varied experiences of freedom that coexisted with slavery throughout the nineteenth century. Freedom in modern Brazil is thus founded in slavery and cannot be analyzed without the legacy of slavery. The Boundaries of Freedom demonstrates those foundations, so crucial to the development of Brazil's current racism and inequality.The first section of articles focuses on practices that sustained and challenged the slave structures of the Brazilian Empire. Two works particularly show this tension by exploring the consequences of the 1831 law on illegal enslavement and child trafficking. The illegal re-enslavement of free people of African descent is an issue that both Beatriz Mamigonian and Grinberg hope to see further discussed. The authors start with how the criminal code of 1830 functioned to perpetuate the condition of slavery among the free and freed racialized poor. They compare prosecutors, judges, and members of superior courts to illustrate the judiciary's role in maintaining slavery. Marcus Carvalho's analysis of child trafficking provincializes the slave trade after 1831 and 1850, illustrating how the beaches of Pernambuco, under the control of local planters, were not only sites of contraband but also places where African-born children were forced into a status that was difficult for courts, dealing with cases of emancipation, to manage in later years.The second section of the book expands on the incomplete freedoms of abolition and postabolition, including discussions on gender and identity, urban geography, and migration and memory. Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado's fascinating analysis of the two (slave and free) identities a Black woman claimed to navigate the uneven road of gradual abolition delineates “the boundaries of freedom.” Her article can help undergraduate students see the consequences of gradual abolition in the real life of a person, and how a formerly enslaved woman told her own story. Fischer examines the lives of three people of African descent in Recife—a slave city that she connects to the Northeast's rural dynamics, informality, intimacy, and power rooted in dependency. Recife, here, is an urban geography of slavery and abolition—much less discussed than Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo during the cycle of coffee expansion—connected to a declining sugar economy. Robson Luis Machado Martins and Flávio Gomes highlight the diversity of Brazil's Black peasantry, which resulted from the mixing of varied groups. The main theme is the intense human mobility of the Southeast, as mobility and autonomy were fundamental to experiences of freedom.The third section on degrees of racial silence and Black intellectual life during the age of abolition may be of particular interest to scholars of racial identity. This part of the book is arguably the strongest, presenting the formation of modern racial identities and subjectivities according to Black intellectuals’ dialogue with the meaning of freedom and citizenship. All articles discuss important Afro-Brazilians in the country's abolitionist movements, from organizations in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo to well-known figures such as Teodoro Sampaio and André Rebouças. Historians Celso Thomas Castilho and Rafaella Valença de Andrade Galvão explore “breaking the silence” of an abolitionist newspaper whose founder chose to specify racial language during the era of the 1871 Free Womb Law, articulating a vision of racial solidarity. In another article, Ana Flavia Magalhães Pinto examines the Black networks (including the Guarda Negra) in republican Rio that defended the citizenship and free status of Afro-descendants; her look at associative life in Rio's postabolition organizations provides further evidence against Jose Murilo de Carvalho's infamous claim that Brazil's people were “bestialiazed” and therefore incapable of sound political action. Further, Wlamyra Albuquerque and Hebe Mattos's discussion of Sampaio and Rebouças, respectively, illustrates the struggles and disappointments of free lettered men during the dismantling of slavery. Sampaio upheld the tutelage of former slaves and indemnifying slave masters, but Albuquerque finds value in his racialized positioning to critically discuss a paradoxical time. Mattos resurrects Rebouças's transnational activism and proto-Pan-Africanism (which ended tragically), reminding historians of the hemispheric abolitionist moment and the incarnations of the enduring idea of Africa.The last part of the volume explores the postabolition period and the “afterlives of slavery.” The editors and authors of this volume, and generations of Brazilian historians, use this phrase to acknowledge the fundamental and lasting impact of African slavery on Brazilian society. Two North American historians, Daryle Williams and Sueann Caulfield, respectively examine such afterlives in art and the changing views of the notorious “Curse of Ham,” in Gilberto Freyre's popular conceptualization of the “Big House,” and the raising of illegitimate children. The last article by Martha Abreu may be of particular interest to US historians as a comparative study of two postabolition music composers, Eduardo das Neves and Bert Williams, and how slave songs endured (with hemispheric commonalities) seeking to transform past legacies and present situations.Although the book's readings may be advanced for undergraduate students, the articles on motherhood and family provide essential analysis of the effects of slavery on Brazilian life. The rest of the volume will certainly inform professors who teach and write about slavery in the Americas, particularly the nineteenth century, when slavery ended in most places of North and South America, due to war, but lasted as political negotiation and declined as resistance and accommodation in Brazil.