Celso Thomas Castilho. Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship.

Abstract

In Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship, Celso Thomas Castilho traces the emergence and consequences of abolitionist discourse over the course of approximately three decades, from the 1860s to the 1880s. More than a study of abolition debate, Castilho’s book offers a complex window into Brazil’s political landscape that illuminates the intertwining of antislavery discourse with popular politics and citizenship rights. Focusing primarily on the northeastern province of Pernambuco, Castilho argues that debates around the emancipation of slavery are best understood in relation to the larger history of nineteenth-century political mobilizations and the contested field upon which Brazilians of various legal stations claimed the right to inclusion. Through a careful analysis of slave flight patterns, freedom lawsuits, public debates and spectacles, manumission societies, political jockeying between Republicans and Conservatives, and provincial and national legislation, the author convincingly uncovers an increasingly dynamic and politicized public space catalyzed by tense discussion over abolition. Castilho’s comment on 1860s Pernambuco, for example, aptly captures his argument throughout the entire book: “interactions between local politics and parliament, associations and the press, and the different mobilizations across the country all factored in redefinitions of political belonging that were set in motion through debates on emancipation” (51).