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 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.

Staël with Delphine in 1802 split Paris into two camps, with conflicting views of art, politics, religion, ethics, and the place of women in society; the quarrel also reached Britain, Germany, and the Alps. Chapter 7 aims to situate several fine studies of the novel’s politics and reception within the broad continuum of a struggle in the field of power over textual meaning and the future of France, fought between Staël’s liberal camp and the camp of Bonaparte – who exiled her from France to end their argument. During this debate, Staël drafted three things – a new preface for Delphine, reflections on the novel’s moral purpose, and a less controversial ending – then chose not to publish them; so, we are looking in a sense at a revision that never happened. Delphine’s original suicide, deleted in the revised manuscript ending, offers a microcosm of this whole debate and will be our focus.

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.

Chapter 11 demonstrates that De l’Allemagne’s surviving 1810 texts are not identical, as had been thought. We have texts from all three proof runs. In Vienna sits a copy of the 1810 edition; the censors’ proof and the copy‑text for 1813 subsist. This makes a mockery of Napoleon’s efforts to obliterate the book, allowing a peek at the “lost” 1810 edition and tracing a remarkable interplay between four conflicting pulls on the author. Her desires to clarify imprecise or obscure passages, and to use key words from elsewhere in De l’Allemagne, confront her desires to be faithful to her sources and to the facts. Exerting its own pull on this interplay is the fierce pressure on Staël to tone down her polemic. These forced revisions fall in with her book’s slide from politics into literary history, which for two centuries now has dimmed the ringing attack on tyranny that caused its pulping.

Chapter 4 proposes answers to the problem facing the friends of liberty when Rousseau’s social contract succumbed beneath the Terror. First, Rousseau in Le Contrat social identifies liberty with citizens’ active participation in the polis or res publica. Jacobin discourse returns often to this definition. Second, as early as the Consulat, Constant opposes this ancient and public liberty, now discredited by the Terror, to the modern private liberty he celebrates: These “positive and negative” liberties have since become a touchstone of modern liberalism. As it happens, this distinction already appears in Staël’s neglected political treatises and broadsides written under the Convention and the Directoire, as shown here. Third, this “negative liberty” of classical liberalism, whose weaknesses we begin to underline today, presents a problem for Staël as a woman that was necessarily less crucial to her friend, a new problem to which her work again offers a solution.

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).

With these words, Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis described May 13, 1888, the day that ended legalized slavery in his country. Brazil was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery; it had also been the largest and the most enduring slave society in the Americas. For more than 350 years, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century until abolition, slavery shaped Brazilian history across nearly every region of its continental geography. Over those centuries, nearly five million enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil, more than 45 percent of the total number of persons forcibly brought to the Americas. In the years that followed that sunny May 13 of abolition, Machado de Assis himself would be witness to the brevity of its joy and to the immense challenges of Brazilian freedom. The scale of those challenges was such that, a scant decade after abolition, Machado de Assis’ friend Joaquim Nabuco would write: “Slavery will long remain Brazil’s defining national feature.” Well over a century later, the power of those words persists: slavery and its legacies remain Brazil’s most formative elements.

Chapter 6 reviews De la littérature. When Staël published this work, she had spent the previous decade growing older alongside the French Revolution, but the coup of 18 Brumaire had just ushered in the Consulat: Napoleon’s star was on the rise. This was not the most obvious time for an ex-minister for war to become a literary historian. Why then did Staël choose this juncture to write and publish her 400-page tractatus? Though we could descend into the weeds of Staël’s many literary details, we would there risk succumbing to a range of propagandist forces. Genevan, liberal, female, and Protestant, Staël has faced two centuries of critics eager to sideline or indeed privatize her achievements, presenting them as tangential to the public shaping of what it means to be French. This chapter argues that Staël’s 1800 work is engagé and focused on saving the Revolution if not the Republic.

Chapter 10 reviews Staël’s impact on French nineteenth-century theater, from her critical discussions in treatises like De l’Allemagne, to which Romantic drama theory owes profound debts, to her own performances in Geneva and across Europe, to her substantial dramatic output, from Voltairean verse tragedies to vaudevilles and avant-garde drames, source for at least two Romantic authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann. Staël’s complex relationship to German Romanticism, from Hoffmann to Tieck and the Schlegels, gains from this review.

This chapter provides a reinterpretation of Modesto Brocos’ well-known painting, Redenção de Cã. Its goal is to resituate the notorious canvas within the complex transitions from bondage to freedom that began in the 1870s and lingered through the 1910s. It argues that Redenção is a painting just as much about a black nineteenth-century emancipationist past as it is about a whitened twentieth-century post-emancipation future. This argument calls into question previous interpretations that have been reluctant to interrogate what is to be made of the Black characters in the canvas and how Brocos – whose contact with Afro-Brazilians began in the 1870s, during his student years, and intensified after 1890 – drew from direct contact with the formerly enslaved to paint his enigmatic portrait of bondage redeemed.