This chapter seeks to illuminate the development of racialized subjectivities as an historical problem in nineteenth-century Brazil. It analyzes the letters and writings of the Afro-descendant engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças (1838–1898), with special attention to the role of racial silence in Rebouças’ personal diary and in the edited papers of his father, lawyer and statesman Antônio Pereira Rebouças (1798–1880). The self-narratives André Rebouças left to posterity are powerful testimony to the significance of transnational politics for universalist Black intellectuals in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In exploring them, this chapter illuminates the racialized subjectivization engendered by the stigma of slavery and portrays the ways in which its politicization was shaped by a collective transnational experience.

Based on an analysis of Black political associations in the nineteenth century, this chapter invite a more attentive observation about the possibilities for action available to free and freed Black people at that time, as well as a re-examination of conceptual categorizations that can be used to legitimize problematic discourses involving the Brazilian racial experience. Along those lines, this article is a counterpoint to established generalizations with regard to the participation of Black and poor populations in the political scene during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Such interpretations have exercised much influence over the ways in which multiple generations of historians have interpreted the trajectories of free Afro-descendants. On the basis of information uncovered about a group of Black organizations that were active in the immediate post-abolition period in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this article aims to analyze the articulations among various efforts organized by the Afro-descendants in defense of their citizenship and status as free people.

This chapter explores the legacy of the patriarchal family structures that were central to Brazilian slavery by exploring the stories of two filhos de criação who brought paternity suits against their natal families in early twentieth-century Brazil. Each was born to an enslaved mother and raised in his alleged white father’s household at the end of the nineteenth century. Their experiences offer rare insight into the internal dynamics of a particular extended family structure that emerged from plantation slavery, in which lower-status filhos de criação were raised to occupy a variety of differentiated social positions within hierarchical extended families. These children seldom moved into the class status of their “legitimate” relatives but instead often maintained life-long, unequal relationships that combined different measures of love, affection, dependence, servitude, and resentment. Their stories reveal continuing uncertainty over how to define and enforce paternal responsibility and family membership in the aftermath of slavery.

This chapter traces the parallel life stories spun by a single woman – “Benedicta” to some and “Ovídia” to others – in pursuit of freedom in 1880s Brazil. Building upon a vast historiography, it uses a single microhistory to recuperate the social practices, ways of life, and world visions that resided below the surface of judicial testimony. In so doing, it opens an important window through which we can apprehend the ways in which women on the borders of slavery and freedom constructed their identity during Brazil’s age of abolition.

Focusing on the life trajectory of Brazilian engineer Teodoro Sampaio, this chapter discusses the possibilities for social transformation available to men of color during and after Brazilian abolition. Sampaio lived through a time when the dismantling of slavery coincided with a racialization of social status, justified by the postulates of scientific racism. His trajectory thus illuminates how an educated son of a freed mother could make his way through a society that was reinventing socio-racial hierarchies even as slavery lost its legitimacy. This chapter aims to elucidate the intricate network of relationships and endeavors engendered by a pardo, born on a large slave property, who managed to become an engineer and manumit his three brothers, who were enslaved on the same plantation where Sampaio himself was raised free. Based on Sampaio’s autobiographical texts, books, articles, and private correspondence – as well as on what his contemporaries wrote about him – this chapter will reflect on what we can learn from Teodoro Sampaio’s life about what it meant to be a free, lettered pardo man during the dismantling of Brazilian slavery.

Slave songs – understood here as songs, dances, movements, and genres developed by the enslaved – profoundly marked the history of conflict and cultural dialogue in slave and post-slavery societies across the Americas. This chapter investigates belle époque slave song performance by focusing on two Black musicians, Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919) and Bert Williams (1874–1922). Their stories demonstrate that the musical field occupied a fundamental space within the politics of Afro-descendant representation, exclusion, and incorporation (real or imagined). Representations of Black people and the meanings attributed to their music could shore up the racial inequalities that reproduced themselves after the end of slavery, but they could also subversively amplify Black struggles for equality and cultural recognition.

This chapter contributes to debates about the relational dynamics of Brazilian slavery, focusing especially on enslaved wet nurses. While the relationships between masters and slaves in the private sphere did involve affection and loyalty, they were also gestated in an environment of abuse, humiliation, and physical and symbolic violence, all of which were essential features of slavery as an institution. Interactions that might be read initially as paradoxical or ambiguous were in fact constitutive of slavery’s ideology of domination, experienced and enacted in various ways by both masters and slaves. The figure of the wet nurse and the practice of relegating breastfeeding to enslaved women – which was generalized among Brazil’s dominant classes during the Empire – helped to forge a slavocratic habitus, a kind of second nature, in which future masters experienced the social relationships of slavery within their intimate circles and everyday lives from a very tender age. This chapter analyzes these domestic and extremely conflictual interactions as an integral part of the slave system, critical to the symbolic and social reproduction of Brazil’s master class.

This chapter discusses the existence and reproduction of enslaved families during Brazil’s second slavery through a case study of the Guaribú fazenda (plantation), located in the Vassouras region of Rio de Janeiro’s Paraíba Valley, which was at the time the world’s most productive coffee region. Guaribú’s history allows us to advance three arguments. First, we demonstrate the ways in which the concepts of “agrarian empires,” “plantation communities,” and “slave neighborhoods” can help us to understand both familial relationships and those that developed between slaves and masters. Second, we show that slave families living on large plantations had better chances than those who lived on smaller estates of remaining together across generations in stable family formations. And finally, we argue that this familial stability enabled Brazil’s “mature slavery,” during which positive birth rates ensured the preservation of enslaved labor even after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850.

This chapter joins empirical research with theoretical reflections in order to explore the formation of post-emancipation narratives and memories in Brazil’s slaveholding southeast. It is possible, in that region, to reintegrate the histories of freedom, control, and autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. In various archives and other historical sources, we can find inscribed – albeit in multivocal form – important intersections in the histories of land, labor, mobility, migration, control, and power. Even though planters sought to maintain freedpeople on the plantations where they had long worked as slaves, freedpeople’s pursuit of autonomy, in the form of control over the rhythms of work and access to land, eventually changed the geography of labor in those areas. In that sense, their experience was common to many societies across the Americas after abolition.

This chapter uses documents and methods from both traditional political history and social history to argues that the origins of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) can be identified in tensions surrounding the abolition of slavery in Uruguay in the 1840s and the definitive ban of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These tensions were at play in the disputes over the consolidation of local nation-states and are central to an understanding of the historical process that fed into the Paraguayan War. By the early 1860s they would reach a point of no return. This argument places slavery and Black agency at the center of Brazil’s nineteenth-century international relations, breaking a silence carefully constructed by statesmen and diplomats of the Brazilian Empire.

Some of the most innovative works in the field of Atlantic slavery in recent years focus on the geographic and conceptual frontiers of enslavement. Working within this historiographical framework, with the intention of furthering the discussion about the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil, we will consider here how cases that involved the enslavement of free people were criminalized and brought to court throughout the nineteenth century. The uneven results of these cases suggest that political choices limited both the application of Article 179 of the Criminal Code (which prohibited the enslavement of free people) and the law of November 7, 1831 (which prohibited the Atlantic slave trade).

This chapter explores the history of Recife’s abolitionist newspaper O Homem and the bold racial politics of its founder, offering a fresh perspective on how the ferment of the abolition debates set in motion important shifts in racial subjectivities. Yet O Homem’s story calls attention to the important nineteenth-century history of racial silencing, which was an ideology and cultural process that shaped power relations. The paper’s founder, Felipe Neri Collaço, illuminated the racialized work that this ideology did in suppressing debates on hierarchy, politics, and, by extension, slavery. O Homem’s history also helps us better understand how the “breaking of this silence” sparked noticeable shifts in racial subjectivities, thus rewriting the racial narrative.

This chapter tells the stories of three young people, living in the northeastern city of Recife, on the cusp of freedom during Brazil’s last decade of slavery. Their stories unveil the malleability of Brazilian bondage in its last gasp but also place in sharp relief the limitations and contradictions of both urban freedom and liberal modernity in a city structured by slavery. In highlighting the continuity and intersectionality inherent in urban struggles for freedom, the chapter seeks to open windows on relational dynamics that shape cities across the globe.