JCWE Special Issue Interview with Keila Grinberg and Fabiane Popinigis

In today’s Muster, JCWE Associate Editor Robert Bland discusses the journal’s recent special issue, “Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Brazil,” with Keila Grinberg and Fabiane Popingis. Dr. Keila Grinberg is a Professor of Brazilian and Latin American History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Popinigis is an associate professor of History at Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

 

Robert Bland: I wonder if you could talk about the origins of this issue, right? How did the idea come about? What was it like working with the JCWE and the Richards Center?

 

Keila Grinberg: So, when the journal approached us, the other editor and me, the idea was to provide the readers of the Journal of the Civil War a sense of the connections with Brazilian historiography, and especially, of course, 19th-century historiography. And one of the things that we, I mean, this is sort of the obvious comparison is that there was a war in South America, the so-called Paraguayan war or Brazilian War between Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina in the 1860s.

But we actually decided to do a different thing. And instead of using Brazil as a comparative case, as there is a long history of comparative studies between Brazil and the US, especially around slavery and 19^th-century slavery, we decided to focus on topics that relate to race and the centrality of race to understanding Brazilian society, but not the ones that are normally used for comparison. So, we wanted to avoid, let’s say the comparative fact, right? Just thinking about Brazilian history and Brazilian society in its own terms.

 

Robert Bland: Tied to that point, I really appreciated the “noisy archives” framework that you used to introduce the journal. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this framework, talk about how the idea of a noisy archive emerged. What archival silences do you think have been pervasive in Brazilian history? And how are you seeking to reintroduce some of those lost voices?

 

Keila Grinberg: Thank you for this question because this was a really important point for us. I mean, one is, of course, a direct engagement with a whole discussion about silence and silencing in the archives, especially when you work with slavery and other underrepresented voices from the past. But the idea of the noisy archives, I think it’s an invitation for a conversation about what the archives tell us and what the archives cannot tell us. And every historian working in an archive knows that the archive cannot tell us everything about the past.

I bet that’s history 101, and that’s impossible. And even though in the structure of the organization of the archives are, of course, voices that were not as heard or as visible in the past, when you actually look at the documents, you can hear all those voices. That’s the idea of noise. That we can, in fact, know a lot; and especially in the sort of Portuguese world the ways that the documents are structured, the ways that you can see, for instance, witnesses in trials, it’s different than the US and the Anglo-Saxon world. You can actually engage a lot with those, let’s say, voices. Even though they are not first person necessarily. So, the idea of noise is that you need to know how to hear them, but they are there.

 

Robert Bland: I’m wondering what you found particularly interesting about the new social histories of the law in slavery and abolition? How do you think about legal history, legal archives, and why are scholars of race in kind of Brazil really interested in kind of the turn towards the social history of the law?

 

Keila Grinberg: I think, and then It would be also interesting to know in a particular case about Fabiane’s work, but we’ve been working, this is a very powerful historiography that are very connected with the US. So that’s also why we wanted to frame it around the social history of the law, because, you know, in the US, in Kate Masur’s work, but also Rebecca Scott about Cuba and all the historiography that came after that it’s really an important topic of dialogue between us in Brazil and what is being done since the mid 1980s in the US. So, the idea of the social history of the law is precisely that the law is not defined by the structure. You know, even though the structures are important. When you think about the law and think about the legal struggles, and you think about the people that are interacting with the law.

The results are not predefined. I will use the World Cup metaphor. When you were watching soccer, there’s always space for the underdog, like the possibility for the goalie to do this amazing thing, of not letting the goal to come in, and just and that’s sort of thing. Of course, I’m abusing of this metaphor, but it’s this way that, at first, the law is really important to understand, not just Brazilian, Latin American society, and I would say U.S. society too. So it’s not something that is predefined by the economic structures even though, of course, it is important to understand.

And the second point is that when you are talking about. Legally, the fine categories such as race have a deep connection with reality, but those legal categories have a real impact on people’s lives. This is something that is crucial if we want to understand Brazilian 19^th-century society. So that’s why the law has been so important. It’s the sources, the documents that we can find, but it’s not just the documents; it’s the fact that legal decisions have a very big impact on people’s lives and especially the lives of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian groups. So that connection is, I think it’s important. And in many ways they are different from the ones in the U.S. So that’s why we wanted to get this discussion in its own terms. That’s why getting out of the comparative framework was so important. But also, because, as I was saying, there is a meditation about history and the historical process. You know, when you look at the law, when you choose to look at the law, you can see spaces for humans to behave in ways that are unpredictable. Of course, we can see how, but they are kind of unpredictable. And I think this is fascinating, because it doesn’t put us, like, in a box, you know, so it’s for us, look at the subjects in the past, people in the past, and for us to look at our own roles. Just to get outside of this previously defined box. I think this is crucial

 

Fabiane Popinigis:  I feel really connected to Keyla and Celso’s proposal and the introduction to the dossier, which I think is really great because it offers a big key to the reading; it carefully unpacks the historiographical trajectory of the social history of law and justice within Brazilian scholarship. It explains the methodological turn of the 80s and 90s, in close interchange with international historiography, especially U.S. historians of law and justice, in both labour history and the history of slavery. Internally, this coincided with the post-dictatorship period and new social movements.

My article emerges from a broader research project on nineteenth- century wage lawsuits, examining how gender functioned as a key organising principle of the labour market.

That was new, and then I found some Freedmen and freedwomen demanding first freedom, and then wages in court. It was a serious challenge to slavery, but also the demand to be compensated for its illegality.  By turning to the courts, they seemed to believe, in some way, that the justice system could intervene in their favour – that theirs was a legitimate claim. The one I particularly analyse here involves a woman who was kidnapped and enslaved as a child. She fights to win her freedom precisely at the dawn of abolition in Brazil, and she won, but then she wanted to go further, seeking to secure her livelihood, the wages owed to her for her labour, but also compensation for the years she had been illegally enslaved. And so the question I had to answer was: was there a political claim to this kind of compensation for former slaves? And I did discover that yes, there was. One major spokesperson for this cause was José do Patrocínio, a well-known black abolitionist in Brazil who called for a form of reparation and left behind extensive writings on the subject. He fought so that black workers, deprived of a land reform that could never happen, might at least be granted fair wages, education and citizenship. All this was unfolding in the 1880’s, as part of an alternative republican project that never came to fruition. These questions persist, and they remain strikingly relevant today.

And about our field of investigation, at a moment of a kind of history that’s being written, “silencing” historical actors again, especially enslaved people and women who disappear as agents in the history of capitalism, it’s especially important to bring these subjects back into view and to show how much of a difference they made in politics and economics, as relevant subjects of historical process. So, it’s a good time to put these people back in the scene through the “noisy archives” and show what historians can do with the sources and the methodological approaches we have been developing over the last few decades.

 

Robert Bland: Along those lines, I wonder what scholars of the American Civil War can learn from the recent literature in Brazilian history around race and the law, especially around questions of slavery and emancipation. I’m thinking of Greg Grandin’s recent work, America, Ameríca, and the comparative lens he uses. We don’t want to get too bogged down into those comparative questions, but I wonder, for kind of a kind of ongoing conversation between Brazil and the United States in the 19th century. What do you think scholars can learn from each other?

 

Keila Grinberg: I think, I mean, there are several things. And one of the points that I find really interesting in your question is that “what can the US historiography learn” from those different cases? Because it’s normally the other way around, right? Like, just an assumption. And one of the things that I find very powerful. It’s just to think as Brazil was a society that has received around a million enslaved Africans just in the 19th century, and that created a whole different society. A slave society like the US, like places in the Caribbean. But it’s a slave society that is structured around different hierarchies. And even though the number of Africans was so huge, the number of manumitted persons was also not huge in the sense of its hemispheric co-parts. So, what kind of society is that where the racial classifications and the racial hierarchies had such a huge presence in terms of the understanding of this society? So, one of the things that I find really interesting is the dynamics between different kinds of people and not, I mean, just going beyond the slave enslaved person and freed person also the several difference between what we call a master or someone who own another person. That could be someone that just like one enslaved person to 200. So, all these different situations and dynamics that in so many ways they are geographically different than the historians of the Civil War in the US.

I think this is a very interesting topic. So, if you think about, especially about the connections between the Civil War and race and slavery. You see two societies that were created sort of around the same connections between colonialism and the slave trade. But they became radically different. So that’s I think that’s something that can be understood. And also, because we tried to also get out of the particular analysis that connect slavery with the war. It’s all the ways in which the racial Catholic bodies are central to understanding Brazil, even when, you know, in the other articles, even when we’re dealing with indigenous persons, even when we are then we’re just free person. You know, you don’t go anywhere in terms of understanding society without thinking about race.

And one last thing is that by including one article about indigenous groups, the one about Maranhão by Alexandre Pelegrino. I think we are also doing something that is important for us in scholarship as well, which is highlighting the connections between what we can call the non-whites. So, the connections between the experiences of indigenous groups and Afro-Brazilians are new in historiographical terms and definitely need more exploration. So, we understand people’s struggles and people’s movements to change their conditions.

 

Fabiane Popinigis:

I see it as an opportunity of thinking beyond our own subjects and localities, not only by comparing cases, but by understanding how people and ideas circulated, and how people drew on shared experiences to transform their own realities. In the current political moment, this perspective is especially necessary. It keeps open a space for struggles over rights, allowing us to learn from past struggles and carry them forward toward a utopian horizon.