The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil (Afro-Latin America)

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. 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 Outline placeholder 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 The Boundaries of Freedom brings together, for the first time in English, key scholars writing on the social and cultural history of Brazilian slavery, emphasizing the centrality of slavery, abolition, and Black subjectivity in the forging of modern Brazil, the largest and most enduring slave society in the Americas. 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 This book brings together key scholars writing on Brazilian slavery and abolition, emphasizing the profound impact it had on the social, political, and institutional history of modern Brazil. For the first time, English-language readers can access in one place arguments that have transformed the historiography of Brazilian slavery.