The Boundaries of Freedom

The Boundaries of Freedom brings together, for the first time in English, a group of key scholars whose work is helping to reconceive the social and cultural history of Brazilian slavery. Brazil was the largest and most enduring slave society in the Americas, with nearly five million enslaved Africans brought forcibly to its shores over four-and-a-half centuries. Slavery was integral to every aspect of its history. This book introduces English-language readers to a paradigm-shifting renaissance in Brazilian scholarship that has upended long-standing assumptions about slavery’s relation to law, property, sexuality, and family; reconceived understandings of slave economies; and explored issues of agency, autonomy, identity, and freedom. These vibrant debates are explored in fifteen essays that emphasize the centrality of slavery, abolition, and Black subjectivity in the forging of modern Brazil and place the Brazilian experience in dialogue with the afterlives of slavery worldwide. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Brodwyn Fischer is Professor of Latin American History at the University of Chicago. Her book A Poverty of Rights received awards from the Social Science History Association, the Urban Studies Association, the Brazilian Studies Association, and the Conference on Latin American History. She is also coeditor of Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America and the author of essays on the histories of law, race, informality, and inequality in urban Brazil.

Keila Grinberg is Professor of Latin American and Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a specialist on slavery and race in the Atlantic world. Her book A Black Jurist in a Slave Society was a finalist for the 2020 Frederick Douglass Prize.