Keila Grinberg. A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship.

Abstract

The English translation of Keila Grinberg’s O fiador dos Brasileiros as A Black Jurist in a Slave Society could not be more timely. As scholars engage with increased urgency in analyses of the structural, cultural, and historical underpinnings of racism, Grinberg’s analysis of race, citizenship, property rights, slavery, and civil law during the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) remains fresh and relevant. Originally published in 2002, the author has incorporated recent scholarship into her historiographical framing for this new edition. The work is based on extensive archival research in Rio de Janeiro’s juridical archives and also incorporates legal treatises, government documents, and Brazil’s rich and voluminous political press. Grinberg uses Antonio Pereira Rebouças, a mulatto jurist and statesman, as a vehicle to explore the evolution of ideas about race, freedom, property, and personhood in post-independence Brazil. The son of a Portuguese tailor and a free woman of color, Rebouças experienced racial discrimination politically and socially despite being elected to provincial and national office and being granted the right to argue cases in Rio de Janeiro’s court of appeals even though he lacked a formal law degree. Rebouças was not an advocate for the oppressed and owned captives himself. Grinberg argues convincingly that his personal experience of racism led him to adopt positions about race and citizenship based on individual merit rather than critiquing the structures that undergirded discrimination. In so doing, he pursued strategies of upward mobility based on personal advancement rather than collective racial uplift, a pattern common to people of color that has been well documented by scholars of race in Brazil.