The Boundaries of Freedom brings together, for the first time in English, writings on the social and cultural history of Brazilian slavery, emphasizing the centrality of slavery, abolition, and Black subjectivity in the forging of modern Brazil. Nearly five million enslaved Africans were forced to Brazil's shores over four and a half centuries, making slavery integral to every aspect of its colonial and national history, stretching beyond temporal and geographical boundaries. This book introduces English-language readers to a paradigm-shifting renaissance in Brazilian scholarship that has taken place in the past several decades, upending longstanding assumptions on slavery's relation to law, property, sexuality and family; reconceiving understandings of slave economies; and engaging with issues of agency, autonomy, and freedom. These vibrant debates are explored in fifteen essays that place the Brazilian experience in dialogue with the afterlives of slavery worldwide.
Author(s): Brodwyn Fischer, Keila Grinberg
Series: Afro-Latin America
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF | Full TOC
Pages: 508
Tags: Sociology Of Race And Ethnicity; Area Studies; Latin American Studies; History; Latin American History
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Flip It Open
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Part I Law, Precarity, and Affective Economies during Brazil’s Slave Empire
1 The Crime of Illegal Enslavement and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
2 “Hellish Nurseries”: Slave Smuggling, Child Trafficking, and Local Complicity in Nineteenth-Century Pernambuco
3 Agrarian Empires, Plantation Communities, and Slave Families in a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Coffee Zone
4 Motherhood Silenced: Enslaved Wet Nurses in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
5 The Abolition of Slavery and International Relations on the Southern Border of the Brazilian Empire, 1840–1865
Part II Bounded Emancipations
6 Body, Gender, and Identity on the Threshold of Abolition: A Tale Doubly Told by Benedicta Maria da Ilha, a Free Woman, and Ovídia, a Slave
7 Slavery, Freedom, and the Relational City in Abolition-Era Recife
8 Migrações ao sul: Memories of Land and Work in Brazil’s Slaveholding Southeast
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Part III Racial Silence and Black Intellectual Subjectivities
9 Breaking the Silence: Racial Subjectivities, Abolitionism, and Public Life in Mid-1870s Recife
10 The Life and Times of a Free Black Man in Brazil’s Era of Abolition: Teodoro Sampaio, 1855–1937
11 Political Dissonance in the Name of Freedom: Brazil’s Black Organizations in the Age of Abolition
12 “The East River Reminds Me of the Paraná”: Racism, Subjectivity, and Transnational Political Action in the Life of André Rebouças
Part IV Afterlives of Slavery, Afterwards of Abolition
13 The Past Was Black: Modesto Brocos, The Redemption of Ham, and Brazilian Slavery
14 From Crias da Casa to Filhos de Criação: Raising Illegitimate Children in the “Big House” in Post-Abolition Brazil
15 Slave Songs and Racism in the Post-Abolition Americas: Eduardo das Neves and Bert Williams in Comparative Perspective
Bibliography
Index
