Precarious Freedoms: Matters of Black Life in Post-Independence Brazil

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Throughout the Americas, racialized violence and the precariousness of black freedom and citizenship continue to mark twenty-first century life. Recent studies of slavery and post-emancipation have contributed to this conversation by interrogating linear slavery-to-freedom narratives that defined earlier scholarship. If structural forces are foundational to understanding slavery’s enduring legacies, this panel seeks to explore their intersection with a variety of less visible areas—illegal enslavement, archives, mental health, and penal practice—that have defined and perpetuated these phenomena. The papers focus on postcolonial Brazil and the wider Atlantic World in between the gradual abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the years following final abolition. They consider how post-independence Brazilian nationhood, founded on appeals to the rule of law and a remarkably inclusive citizenship, yet deeply steeped in the illegal slave trade and rampant anti-black racism, engendered various forms of institutional and interpersonal violence against Africans and Afro-descendants that threatened their possibilities of life and liberty. 

Williams investigates the illegality of post-emancipation by tracing the kidnapping, reenslavement, and disappearance of hundreds of legally “liberated Africans.” Miki explores how illegal slavery’s archives create dissonant narratives of liberation that normalize the death and suffering of illegally enslaved Africans. Jean discusses how the House of Correction’s disciplinary “education” of poor children shaped ex-slaves’ terms of freedom and citizenship. Childs examines the relationship of slavery and psychosis in the post-emancipation era.

Together, these papers on the precariousness of freedom are fundamental to understanding the ongoing challenges to justice and inclusion in the Americas.

Sub Track

• Afro-Latin/Indigenous Peoples

Session Organizer

• Yuko Miki, Fordham University

Chair

• Mary Ann Mahony, Central Connecticut State University

Discussant

• Keila Grinberg, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Individual Presentations

• The Dangerous Life of the Free African “Runway” in Brazilian Slave Society - Daryle Williams, University of Maryland

• Narrating Freedom in the Archives of Illegal Slavery - Yuko Miki, Fordham University

• Disciplining Children at Rio de Janeiro’s Penitentiary: Poverty and Apprenticeship during Brazil’s Protracted Emancipation Era - Martine Jean, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

• The Fugitive Who “Became” a Madman: Race & Psychosis in Post-Emancipation Brazil - Greg L Childs, Brandeis University