Current Issue
Volume 16, No. 2
June 2026
Special Issue: “Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Brazil”
This special issue examines how Brazilian historians have engaged with legal sources to reconstruct the experiences of Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in nineteenth-century Brazil. Since the 1980s, historians of Brazil have been asking new questions about the workings of the law, achieving nuanced understandings of enslavement, freedom, and the changing meanings of race over time. That scholarship led to Brazilian contributions to the “social history of the law,” in which courts were important arenas of contestation and power struggle. Grounded in close readings of the archival sources, the Brazilian contribution to nineteenth-century historiography has extended far beyond mere understanding of the Brazilian context or comparison with U.S. scholarship. Instead, these works have critically challenged traditional concepts of race, highlighting actions by enslaved and freed Afro-Brazilians that questioned established racial hierarchies and expanded notions of rights and social expectations.
This article traces Indigenous land disputes in nineteenth-century Brazil, centering on a claim from a small village in northern Brazil in the 1820s and the 1830s. It analyzes how a local Indigenous community fought in court to annul an aforamento, a practice similar to land leasing, conceded to the settler Mateus Severino de Avelar. The proceedings reveal how Indigenous groups successfully drew on colonial practices and forged alliances with other Luso-Brazilian settlers to defend against the encroachment of their lands. Broadly, the article demonstrates that Indigenous land dispossession was neither a linear nor an inevitable process and that its study sheds insights onto local legal cultures and institutions.
Fabiane Popinigis — Beyond Freedom: Stolen Back Wages and Radical Popular Abolitionism in Brazil
This article examines demands for restitution within the context of abolitionist struggles in 1880s Brazil, investigating competing visions of work reorganization and citizenship. It situates the struggle of Hermínia da Conceição for her freedom and her salaries alongside the work of the Black abolitionist José do Patrocínio, who championed the cause of restitution and wages for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. At a moment when slave-owners and planters were demanding compensation for lost property in persons as a condition for abolition, popular and radical abolitionists called for immediate and unconditional abolition. Some demanded still greater rights and reparations for freedpeople. Doing so, this study sheds light on the role of wage labor in the uneven processes of emancipation and labor regimes reorganization that, rather than dismantling coercion, diversified its forms amid the struggles to overcome slavery as a system of domination.
The focus of this article is the Militia of Pardo Men of Rio de Janeiro (free and freed-men of color) at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on petitions and official letters, it demonstrates the importance of the militia as an institutional space through which pardo men residing in the city organized themselves collectively. By rendering valuable military services, these men learned to mobilize themselves to challenge the royal bureaucracy to obtain what they judged to be a right. Here, the notion of a right did not, as it already did in the United States, refer to the liberal world of universal civil rights. Rather, pardo officers demanded the enforcement of recent laws granting them access to higher militia ranks. The first generation had to confront the staunch opposition of colonial administrators and the local elite to their claims. Yet, this generation’s achievements consolidated the militia of pardo men of Rio de Janeiro, encouraging younger officers to become more engaged, starting in 1821 in the fight for Brazilian independence and leading some young pardo men to launch themselves politically through the press in 1831.
This essay examines how very likely Black and Indigenous residents of nineteenth-century Campinas, Brazil, used the courts to challenge racial insults that threatened their freedom, honor, and citizenship in a slaveholding society. Drawing on fifty-four cases of verbal slander, it argues that racist slurs—particularly those evoking slavery, animalization, and color—could endanger the tenuous legal status of free people of color by associating them with enslavement. Placing Campinas’s cases within Brazil’s evolving constitutional order, the essay shows how litigants mobilized the law to assert dignity and claim citizenship rights in everyday conflicts. A comparative discussion engages Cheryl Harris’s insights on whiteness as property, revealing how racial hierarchy operated as a material structure of privilege across post-slavery societies. The article concludes by tracing the long arc from nineteenth-century disputes to twentieth-century efforts to criminalize racist slurs in Brazil, highlighting a deep genealogy of antiracist struggle.
