Free Womb Research Articles

Una historia de la emancipación negra: Esclavitud y abolición en la Argentina

The abolition of Latin American slavery has long been recognized as a complex and contentious process stretching over several decades. Historians who study that process face the challenge of incorporating into their stories multiple actors: state officials, lawyers, journalists, activists, and, not least, enslaved people actively seeking freedom. That approach has generated a rich historiography, ranging from early work by Emília Viotti da Costa, Robert Conrad, Rebecca Scott, and others up through recent books by scholars such as Jeffrey Needell, Angela Alonso, and Yesenia Barragan. Based on deep and meticulous research and clearly and effectively written, Magdalena Candioti's Una historia de la emancipación negra is a worthy addition to that literature.Candioti begins her story with the profoundly destabilizing impacts of national independence on the institution of slavery. Revolutionary rhetoric that compared Spanish rule to enslavement and that promised to strike off the chains of colonial rule inevitably raised the question of whether that promise included the chains of slavery. Since many, and probably most, independence leaders were themselves slave owners, this question struck uncomfortably close to home. The contradiction between national freedom and continuing enslavement produced first the abolition of the African slave trade in 1812 and then the Free Womb Law (Ley de Libertad de Vientres) the following year. The law decreed that children of enslaved mothers would continue to serve their mothers' enslavers until reaching the age of majority (16 for females, 20 for males), at which point they would achieve full freedom.One ambiguity of the new law was whether children of enslaved mothers were born free (and were therefore ingenuos) or whether they were born enslaved and then immediately freed (and were therefore libertos). The Reglamento de Libertos, approved a month after the initial law, settled that question and laid out the regulations governing this new class of persons. In 1840, a court in Tucumán found that “los derechos y obligaciones que tiene el patrono [enslaver of the child's mother] respecto del liberto son los mismos que tiene un amo respecto de un esclavo; . . . ambos tienen el derecho de servirse y sacar del liberto y esclavo una justa utilidad” (p. 88; emphasis in original). Patronos were also free to sell their libertos (after the age of two) to other owners, and Candioti finds many instances of slave parents going to the police to request assistance in getting their children back, “con suerte dispar” (p. 86).Meanwhile, those Africans and Afro-Argentines who had been enslaved at the time of the Free Womb Law's passage remained enslaved. They continued to pursue freedom in the same ways that they had pursued it under colonial rule, through negotiating with their enslavers and accumulating the savings with which to buy their freedom. Candioti finds that the same system of coartación (enslaver and enslaved person agreeing in advance on a fixed purchase price) that existed in Cuba, Peru, and other countries operated in Argentina as well, and that, as in other countries, women were clearly favored over men in grants of manumission (pp. 111–12).Independence further undermined slavery by opening another route to freedom, through military service. Several thousand slaves were conscripted into rebel armies and then into provincial forces during the civil wars that followed independence. Slaves could also volunteer for service, and many did so. Conscription was no guarantee of freedom, however, since many draftees died or returned from service broken in health.With no new slaves being born or imported from Africa, by the 1840s slavery's days in Argentina were clearly numbered. Reviewing the debates in the constitutional assembly of 1852–53, Candioti finds that Article 15, which abolished slavery, was approved with zero discussion, no voices speaking either for or against the measure. The constitution made no provision for compensation to former enslavers, but several provinces did institute programs that compensated owners for their liberated property.Throughout her book, Candioti stresses the tensions and disconnects between legal principles and daily lived reality, and the constant process of negotiation among enslaved persons, libertos, enslavers, and state officials. She has dug deep into administrative, judicial, and church archives and into nineteenth-century newspapers, and has made excellent use of the outpouring of research in recent years on Black and subaltern history in Argentina. Finally, rather than confining herself to Buenos Aires, she surveys conditions and practices throughout Argentina while simultaneously calling for further research on those provinces. All these aspects make the book a signal achievement and the obligatory reference for how slavery came to an end in Argentina.

Yesenia Barragan. Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars from North American institutions have sought to expand historical understanding of the process of abolition in Spanish America. Yesenia Barragan’s book analyzing the case of the Colombian Black Pacific is a major contribution to this scholarship. It draws on the rich tradition of Colombian history and the Colombian Pacific, offering a comprehensive analysis that emphasizes the gradualness of Black emancipation and the significance of the regulation of the status of the “Free Womb Children”—free sons and daughters born to enslaved mothers after the passage fo the Free Womb Law— as a form of “racial governance” (p. 6) of the new generations of Black inhabitants of the Valle del Cauca. The book is made up of six chapters divided in three interlinked parts, covering the “social universe of the Colombian Black Pacific,” (p. 37), the laws and technologies of gradual emancipation, and the final abolition and its afterlives. The first chapter is centered on the description of the material and social world of the lowlands: its geography, rivers, mining economy, and legends. Using secondary sources, travel accounts and records from the national and local archives, chapter two describes the lives of slaves and emancipated blacks the cities of Quibdó and Nóvita. The third chapter describes the antecedents to the Free Womb Law of 1821, especially the Antioquian law of 1814. In dialog with Edgardo Pérez Morales’s thesis (now book, Unraveling Abolition: Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia [2022]), it analyzes political antislavery arguments, their impact in Nóvita, and the opposition they roused there. In chapter four, Barragan explores the popular circulation of the law, marks the importance of baptismal records as proofs of freedom, and unveils conflicts around the control of Free Wombs’ children’s lives. In chapter five, Barragan reconstructs three routes to freedom: self-purchase, testamentary manumissions, and public manumissions. The author analyzes the political use of the latter in conversation with Jason McGraw’s “Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia” (Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 2 [2011], 269–88) and details how those manumissions had different impulse in different contexts. Chapter six reconstructs the final abolition process, attempts to delay it, and the politics of compensation. The epilogue connects this process to the present day and emphasizes how the vernacular freedom woven daily by the lowland inhabitants challenged Colombian white supremacy.

The Free Womb Law and the administration of historical time in Imperial Brazil

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é compreender a Lei do Ventre Livre por meio de uma análise do tempo histórico. O argumento é de que a lei de 28 de setembro de 1871 foi, em seu longo processo de gestação, concebida como um instrumento para controlar o tempo da emancipação brasileira, pautando o seu ritmo, intensidade e duração. A análise será fundamentada nos debates do Conselho de Estado de 1867 e 1868, nos debates parlamentares de 1870 e 1871, nas discussões na imprensa em 1871 e em uma gravura que comemorou a liberdade do ventre assim que ela foi aprovada.

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

Historian Yesenia Barragan has produced a profound and cutting-edge interpretation of American freedom and unfreedom. In Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific, Barragan weaves a case study of Colombia into the larger fabric of Black Atlantic history. One of her major interventions is to rethink the significance of the early republican period in general and gradual slave emancipation in particular. These are well-known but rarely studied conjunctures, and the latter receives short shrift from scholars. Yet as Barragan asserts, Colombia's 1821 gradual emancipation law was a “relatively successful biopolitical experiment in social control” that generated a new racial order, new labor regimes, and new (if rarely fulfilled) antislavery sensibilities (22). This gradual emancipation rule, as Barragan calls it, took three main forms: self-purchase, public manumissions, and the so-called Free Womb provision. The book analyzes each from both the legal-political perspective and the perspective of the affected African-descended people. Together they shaped the possibilities of bondage and liberation for a generation.Freedom's Captives zeroes in on the Chocó, a relatively remote, rainforest-covered, and gold-rich province of northwest Colombia. Historically and to this day, the Chocó's population has been overwhelmingly of African descent, a legacy of Spanish colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and coerced gold extraction from the region's mineral-rich waterways. Yet as Barragan argues, the region's remoteness and mineral wealth opened possibilities for autonomy and even legal freedom for Afro-Colombians.Early chapters trace the rural and town-based worlds of both enslavers and unfree peoples of the Chocó, with a focus on the men who rowed boats and women who prospected gold along the infinite waterways of this jungle region. The story then zooms out to a national perspective of early republican legal and political cultures, with a focus on the 1821 gradual emancipation law at the Congress of Cucutá. At stake was the legal creation of the much-contested Free Womb provision, whereby a child born to an enslaved woman would at adulthood gain legal freedom but remained a “captive” until then (134). Barragan then returns to the Chocó to examine how these national legal changes informed the social calculus of Pacific lowlanders. The Free Womb captives endured an active market in the buying and selling of their unfree labor while self-purchase, the main route to legal freedom, fueled the extractive economy of gold mining. Public manumission ceremonies, despite their political and emotional charge, nonetheless reinforced the subordination of enslaved people. The book's narrative ends around final abolition in the early 1850s, when a new subsistence-based society took hold in the Chocó, much to the chagrin of Colombia's ruling classes.Scholars will find that the book has many strengths. For one, its constant comparisons to other country contexts add up to a thorough accounting of hemispheric changes in gradual emancipation. The comparative analysis is capacious and deeply integrated into every chapter. Barragan has read widely in the scholarship. I have not seen a monograph that so systematically introduces relevant interpretations of other countries. As Barragan points out, Colombians at the time were in conversation with other Americans about emancipation, hence our need to understand how Free Womb provisions and other abolitionist ideas circulated beyond Colombia. Students of comparative slavery and emancipation in the Americas will appreciate such thorough cross-country connections that are rarely made by historians, as well as the most up-to-date bibliography and synopses of the state of the field. But it is much more than that. The effect of reading this constant comparative framework is substantial. For the first time, the Colombian example feels properly integrated into the wider story of slave emancipation in the Americas. Barragan has placed the country at the forefront of the scholarship on the subject.On top of the important comparative analysis, the book is deeply researched. Barragan carried out work in six archives in four Colombian cities plus archives in Britain and the United States. (Investigating notarial records—notoriously byzantine—in the Chocó could not have been easy!) In addition to these manuscript collections, Barragan uses an array of historical newspapers and published primary sources. The result of such comprehensive research is a narrative that portrays the world of the Colombian Pacific in vivid detail. The everyday lives of free and enslaved rural lowlanders rise from the page. While warning us about the lapses and silences in the written record, Barragan has nonetheless reconstructed to a remarkable extent the stories of individuals struggling for freedom.A final strength is the writing. Barragan is a wordsmith. The care she has taken in crafting sentences shines throughout, making the book a pleasure to read. The grace of the prose only adds to the intellectual bounty of this important book.

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

In the late 1840s Magdalena, a young woman of African descent, was held overnight in the stocks, “accompanied only by the steady rain, constellations of stars, and animals that roamed the village of Noanamá,” an Indigenous settlement in Chocó, Colombia (p. 1). Magdalena was “a child of the Free Womb,” born after the introduction of gradual abolition legislation in 1821 and into a world of limited and violent freedoms (p. 2). She emerged from the stocks with one of her hands disabled and scarred. Yesenia Barragan's Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific begins with this vignette, immediately immersing the reader in the physical world of nineteenth-century Chocó during “gradual emancipation rule.” Freedom's Captives retells the story of gradual emancipation, abolition, and liberalism by centering free womb children like Magdalena and their families.The book is organized into three parts. The first, “The Social Universe of the Colombian Black Pacific,” comprises two chapters that use journeys as entry points into rural aquatic Chocó (chapter 1) and its urban settlements (chapter 2). The second part of the book, “The Time of Gradual Emancipation Rule,” consists of three chapters. Chapter 3 narrates the creation of gradual emancipation rule and the emergence of an abolitionist public sphere, while chapter 4 turns to technologies of governance and analyzes the articulations of these processes on the ground. Chapter 5 examines modes of manumission, self-purchase and testamentary manumission, that continued and were transformed during gradual emancipation rule, and the infrequent emancipations granted by manumission juntas. The third part of the book, titled “Final Abolition and the Afterlife of Gradual Emancipation,” consists of a chapter considering final abolition, its immediate afterlives, and the Pacific iterations of the “problem of freedom” (p. 264). The book finishes with an epilogue that explores more recent histories of political conflict, racialized violence, and Afro-Colombian mobilization for peace in Chocó.Two key threads weave through Freedom's Captives. Its major contribution, the first thread, is that gradual emancipation rule was central to the history of slavery and Black freedom. Gradual emancipation rule begins in 1821, after Colombia's first gradual abolition law, and ends in 1852, with the final abolition of slavery. Barragan thus spotlights a period that often appears as an addendum to slavery proper or as part of the institution's inevitable slow decline. This book retells the political history of nineteenth-century Colombia by centering slavery and unfreedom; liberal elites sought to associate slavery with Spanish colonialism and themselves with republican freedom. Yet gradual emancipation rule, characterized by dynamic transformation and uncertainty, was also a form of domination through which liberal governments produced new modes of unfreedom to control Black people and their labor, on the one hand, and performed freedom as white generosity, on the other. Significantly, Barragan eschews the question of citizenship, about which there is a vast and ever-growing literature. She complements this work by demonstrating the particularities of place in Chocó, where other political processes were of more pressing significance—namely, gradual abolition.The second thread is geographical and material. Barragan captures the paradoxical place of Chocó. It was simultaneously a site of violent enslavement and a landscape of possibilities, where mining gold could allow the purchase of freedom and the rivers and forests permitted refuge from slavery and a measure of autonomy. While deepening understanding of Chocó’s racialized and marginalized location in the Colombian national imaginary as a frontier, she also makes clear that it was a central place, where Black people extracted gold from the soil, capital was accumulated, and ideas were circulated and transformed.Freedom's Captives imaginatively interweaves myriad archival sources, including laws, court cases, baptismal records, notarial records, and wills, with travel narratives. Barragan's historical ethnographic approach is impressive. She uses travelogues and visual materials to immerse the reader in Chocó’s aquatic landscape in a process that she describes as mobilizing the “narrative eye [of travelers] to draft potential universes rendered invisible by slavery's archive” (p. 31). Barragan is highly attentive to the ethics of working with slavery's archive to reconstruct the material world of nineteenth-century Chocó, as much as is possible from extant sources.Freedom's Captives will be of interest to scholars and students of Colombian, Latin American, US, and African diaspora history. The work is deeply situated in Black studies as well as Latin American historiography. Barragan makes extensive reference to the antislavery movements and emancipation in the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America, reflecting the need for more scholarship on gradual emancipation in Colombia. Gradual emancipation rule is a useful interpretive lens that can be applied across the Americas and opens up new analytical possibilities. Pioneering and beautiful, Freedom's Captives is the first historical monograph to center the Colombian Black Pacific, a crucial and understudied part of the diaspora that offers “its own distinct history of black dispossession and possibility” (p. 7).

El asedio a la libertad: Abolición y posabolición de la esclavitud en el Cono Sur

El asedio a la libertad: Abolición y posabolición de la esclavitud en el Cono Sur

The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Hiding in Plain Sight is a new contribution to the study of African descendants in the Río de la Plata and one of the few works in English to examine continuities and transformations in race relations from the late colonial to the early national period. The title refers to the relative success that some African-descended women and their families from the province of Córdoba achieved in “whitening” their social status and erasing their African and mixed-race past. In Erika Edwards's analysis, a number of mulata and parda concubines, wives, and mothers “negotiated their own invisibility” as a result of a conscious generational strategy to ascend to whiteness and claim the social privileges restricted to those publicly recognized to possess a white identity (p. 2). Like Ann Twinam in her study on whiteness in Spanish America secured through the colonial gracias al sacar petitions, Edwards finds that “whitened” women in Córdoba most often achieved social mobility through relations with white men. Case studies drawn from an examination of ecclesiastical and civil court cases as well as Bourbon and early nineteenth-century censuses provide examples of slave concubines and wives of white men whose children were manumitted or registered in the book of “white” baptisms, and several women were recognized with the honorifics of señora or doña. According to Hiding in Plain Sight, institutional policies to whiten society eclipsed African-descended women's individual strategies in the late colonial and early republican periods. This project by provincial authorities sought to enlighten and discipline the large nonwhite population. By the 1832 census for the province's capital city, the myriad racial distinctions for those of African descent had collapsed into one category, “pardo”—a result, Edwards argues, of a shift “from an identity based on reputation and social and moral attributes to an identity based on inherited traits” (p. 44).Hiding in Plain Sight depicts Córdoba as a conservative society, jealous to maintain white privilege. The first two chapters detail the rise of a significant free casta population in the city of Córdoba by the 1770s in the context of constantly policed social boundaries. Slave families often created social networks that allowed them to purchase the freedom of children and wives. Edwards also uncovers examples of slaves who petitioned the state to emancipate them by arguing that they were Indians and thus illegally in bondage. Bourbon efforts to reestablish social hierarchy increased surveillance of the poor and nonwhite population suspected of idleness and immorality but also established new schools to uplift them from their “barbaric and ignorant state” (p. 33). Edwards studies how these attitudes were preserved after independence by governing elites who closely held political power, even as they recruited slaves for independence armies, freed slaves born after 1813 at adulthood, and further expanded access to public schools in order to impart new behaviors and mores to mixed-race girls and future mothers. According to Edwards, “manumitted African descendants enrolled in these schools to whiten themselves” (p. 104).The following chapters are organized thematically, examining the paths to freedom and respectability that African-descended women chose. Despite legal and customary restrictions, some women of African descent found in concubinage, marriage, and manumission means for social mobility. In one case study, the light-skinned slave mistress of a priest was able to “escape . . . blackness” by violating late colonial sumptuary laws, acting as the señora of the household and dressing with luxurious clothes appropriate for that role (p. 49). In other cases, women of alleged African descent contested the 1776 Royal Pragmatic, which prohibited “unequal marriages,” by seeking to prove their Spanish or Indian genealogy; in eight documented cases, slave women married Spanish men and achieved freedom for themselves and their children. Manumission was most often granted by slave owners in recognition of valued service. Edwards also points to the role of slave mothers as court supplicants seeking to free their children by claiming an Indian identity, appealing for enforcement of the 1813 Free Womb law for their children, or asserting that slave owners had forfeited their rights by acting dishonorably. Edwards underscores the agency of women of African descent in pursuing the privileges of whiteness. She does acknowledge that this path was not possible for those women without white allies or light skin (p. 3). Yet we know much less about the African-descended community who might have pursued horizontal solidarities and made it more difficult to render Blacks invisible in Argentina. Similarly, though much of the analysis examines legal cases, we know relatively little of the role of learned intermediaries, such as colonial notaries and court-appointed defensores de pobres, in shaping the identities that women asserted in these public forums.

Commerce in Children: Slavery, Gradual Emancipation, and the Free Womb Trade in Colombia

AbstractIn 1821, as the Wars of Independence drew to a close, officials of the newly created republic of Gran Colombia passed a national gradual emancipation law. At the center of it was a Free Womb law that declared legally free the children of enslaved women born after the law's promulgation, while bonding these children to their mothers’ masters until the age of 18. Yet, in addition to establishing a term limit on their legalized captivity, the law stipulated conditions for the commerce in Free Womb children, laying the groundwork for what I refer to as the Free Womb trade. This article presents the first detailed exploration of the origins, operations, and limitations of the Free Womb trade in Colombia, particularly at the level of one province: the northwestern Pacific coastal province of Chocó. I argue that the trade created distinctly bounded market geographies of Free Womb children, who were actively, if at times ambiguously, incorporated into Colombia's slave economy. As a general rule, the Free Womb trade placed captive families at the mercy of their masters; yet, as one extraordinary case reveals, the full extent of the local trade's legal power was not entirely secure.

Frederico Baptista de Souza: the formation of a Black editor in the South Atlantic

ABSTRACT Frederico Baptista de Souza was born to a slave mother during the period of the Free Womb Law in Brazil (1871). After slavery’s abolition, Souza campaigned in favor of full citizenship for formerly enslaved people. Black newspapers in São Paulo originated from the clubs of people who were prohibited from enjoying the clubs attended by whites regardless of their class. I examine the Black press’ rise through Souza, founder of one of the region’s oldest and longest running racial groups, the Dramatic and Recreational Guild Kosmos. Apart from coordinating, producing, and editing papers, Souza wrote op-eds and figured among those who shaped public opinion about Brazilian racial matters, often articulating ideas and concepts from other regions of the world, especially the “uplift generation” of the United States. Souza’s life is evidence of a once thriving and engaging Black press in this corner of the Atlantic that was São Paulo.

As famílias cativas de Itapemirim nos anos finais da escravidão (Província do Espírito Santo, 1872-1888)

O presente artigo pretende apresentar a família cativa de Itapemirim nos anos finais da escravidão (1872-1888). O recorte temporal foi feito entre a promulgação de duas leis importantes: a Lei do Ventre Livre (1871), que tornava libertos os nascidos de ventre cativo após aquela data, e a Lei Áurea, que colocou fim a escravidão. As fontes utilizadas nessa pesquisa foram as cartoriais (inventários post mortem e testamentos) e as eclesiásticas (livro de batismo). Esses documentos revelam a existência da família cativa de Itapemirim, que no período analisado estava consolidada na região. Para a identificação dessas famílias foi realizado o método onomástico, além de recorte serial para análise dos dados. A maioria das famílias eram matrilineares, algumas com poucos e outras com muitos filhos. Também se percebe a presença de muitos africanos, mesmo décadas após o fim do tráfico internacional de almas. Inúmeras denúncias de desembarque de africanos foram feitas nesse período, e a trama do tráfico envolvia as províncias do Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais.

“Futuros operários do progresso”

O presente artigo discute os projetos de educação que foram tecidos ao longo do século XIX no Brasil Imperial, particularmente após a promulgação da Lei do Ventre Livre. Os debates sobre a formação de mão de obra sob a perspectiva do fim gradual da escravidão colocaram em destaque a figura do ingênuo, e a necessidade de criação de institutos de educação afim de promover a educação oficiosa destes menores. Por meio de notícias publicadas nos periódicos de Belém foi possível compreender os discursos sobre a noção de educação e trabalho. Após abolição foi fundado o Club 13 de maio e da escola 13 de maio, que funcionou em Belém nos meses subsequentes a abolição da escravidão. Â

The 1877-1879 drought in Imperial Brazil: from Senator Pompeu to André Rebouças: teachings on workers and the market.

In the 1870s, the Brazilian Empire sanctioned the Free Womb Law (1871) and a set into motion a series of modernizing reforms. Amid the crisis of slavery and the drought and famine of 1877-1879, landowners and slaveholders, ministers, provincial presidents, and representatives of technical knowledge forged plans to utilize the "free labor" provided by migrants, which showed clear leanings toward the peasant economy. During the first year of the drought, the engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças wrote and published a series of articles comparing famine-stricken Ceará with British India, seeking a model of governance to be followed in Brazil.

Free Womb Law, Legal Asynchronies, and Migrations

AbstractThis article analyzes in depth the history of Petrona, an enslaved woman sold in Santa Fe (Argentina), sent to Buenos Aires and later possibly to Montevideo (Uruguay). By reconstructing her case, the article demonstrates how the legal status of enslaved persons was affected by the redefinitions of jurisdictions and by the forced or voluntary crossings between political units. This study also shows the circulation and uses of the Free Womb law in Argentina and Uruguay and traces legal experts’ debates over its meaning. At the same time, it reflects on the knowledge enslaved people had of those abolitionist norms and how they used them to resist forced relocations, attempt favorable migrations, or achieve full freedom. The article crosses analytical dimensions and historiographies—legal, social, and political— and articulates them by reflecting more broadly on these factors: the impact of the revolution of independence on enslaved persons’ lives, the scarce circulation of abolitionist public discourse in Río de la Plata, the gendered bias of the process, and the central yet untold uses of antislavery rhetoric in the national narratives.

A INVISIBILIDADE DA CRIANÇA NEGRA NA PROVÍNCIA DO PARANÁ

Sabe-se que a região Sul do Brasil exalta a presença de imigrantes de trabalhadores brancos europeus na constituição da sua população. Porém, a presença de 36 comunidades quilombolas, certificadas no Paraná, continuam ignoradas e invisibilizadas. Este artigo traz resultados da análise de documentos primários do Arquivo Público do Paraná, como as Listas de escravos para emancipação (1873-1886) na província do Paraná, observados sob a perspectiva dos estudos culturais. No período mencionado, a Lei do Ventre Livre não garantiu a liberdade das crianças negras, pois foram mantidas sob a tutela de seus donos até os 21 anos. Para tanto, deviam pagar a tutela com serviços compulsórios ligados ao universo rural e doméstico, como roceiros, campistas, domésticos/as, pajens, cozinheiros/as, costureiras, ou então eram entregues ao Estado. Conclui-se que a invisibilidade da criança negra corresponde a uma ideologia que sustenta a superioridade branca e inferioridade negra, contribuindo com o retrato de um Paraná branco, e perpetuando marcas de discriminação e preconceito racial que afetam as crianças negras no espaço escolar contemporâneo.

Filial freedoms, ambiguous wombs: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the 1871 Brazilian free womb law

ABSTRACTFollowing the Free Womb Law of 1871 in Brazil, hundreds of enslaved persons appealed for their freedom on the basis of filial ties. These cases included children who were born before the Free Womb Law. However, jurists and legislators struggled to define what constituted a ‘free womb’ when children were conceived before the passage of the Free Womb Law. Using court cases, parliamentary notes, and newspaper accounts, this article analyzes juridical attempts to define ‘free,’ ‘enslaved,’ and ‘conditionally free’ wombs, from the use of the Roman principle partus sequitur ventrem to the passage of the Free Womb Law.

A trajetória de Tácito Pires entre a história social do trabalho e do pós-abolição (Rio Grande do Sul, 1874-1939)

Por meio da trajetória de Tácito Pires e de alguns de seus escritos, busca-se conectar questões da história social do trabalho com estudos do pós-abolição. Dentre os desafios, o de transformar em problema histórico a cor dos trabalhadores e apreender a maneira como ideias de raça foram manejadas pelos próprios sujeitos. Nascido de ventre livre em 1874 em Porto Alegre, Tácito Pires faleceu em 1939 na cidade natal. Desde 1908 deslocou-se pelo Estado como professor público, mantendo residência por maior tempo em Bagé.

Making Generations: Gender, Reproduction, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

Making GenerationsGender, Reproduction, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora Tala Khanmalek (bio) Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning. —Gayl Jones, Corregidora In response to editor Charles H. Rowell’s question about why she incorporates the “Afro-Brazilian slave experience” into her 1975 neo-slave narrative, Corregidora, Gayl Jones declares: “I’d like to be able to deal with the whole American continent in my fiction—the whole Americas—and to write imaginatively of blacks anywhere/everywhere.”1 Although the novel is set in the southern United States from the mid-1940s to the 1960s, nineteenth-century Brazil punctuates the plot at every turn. The narrator, Ursa Corregidora, is a blues singer in Kentucky, where she was born and raised by her foremothers: Mama, Gram, and Great Gram. As Ursa’s recollection of the past reveals, Great Gram had been enslaved in Brazil, where she gave birth to her daughter, Gram. Ursa’s present context is shaped by the history of chattel slavery in both North and South America. The novel deals with a whole American continent mired in a New World order founded on enslaved women’s reproductive lives and labor. Considering Jones’s hemispheric focus, taking into account nineteenth-century Brazil offers new ways to understand the novel. Ursa’s recollections consist primarily of Great Gram and Gram’s experiences of sexual violence under a Portuguese slave master named Corregidora. Ursa’s foremothers insist on “making generations” of specifically daughters who can carry on the memory of these experiences. The command to make generations thus rests upon reproduction. The law of partus sequitur vetrem, meaning “that which is brought forth follows the womb,” made slavery hereditary in both Brazil [End Page 1] and the US. Historian Jennifer L. Morgan emphasizes, “Women’s lives under slavery in the Americas always included the possibilities of their wombs.”2 In Brazil the law of partus was abolished prior to the abolition of slavery at large, changing the meaning of reproduction in the context of ongoing enslavement. The characters’ preoccupation with making generations is embedded in the complicated legal system of nineteenth-century Brazil, which covers a period of gradual emancipation from 1871 to 1888. By analyzing this familial refrain in the novel alongside the 1871 Free Womb Law, which abolished partus prior to the abolition of slavery, I suggest that making generations attempts to counteract rather than perpetuate control over reproduction and redress past injury while unsettling assumptions of pastness in the whole Americas. Importantly, Ursa undergoes a hysterectomy at the outset of the novel after a confrontation with her husband, Mutt Thomas, who disapproves of her singing the blues onstage. From Ursa’s fragmented memories while in recovery, we learn of “Old man Corregidora,” Great Gram’s slave master and both Gram and Mama’s father.3 I begin with an overview of how making generations has been interpreted as an oppressive narrative that tethers Ursa to Great Gram’s traumatic past and, in doing so, subjects her to Corregidora’s mastery despite the fact that she—like Gram and Mama—is not enslaved. According to this interpretation, Ursa’s hysterectomy creates the conditions of possibility for breaking a self-perpetuated cycle of reproductive control and instead taking hold of the blues as a liberatory alternative. I then situate making generations within the context of gradual emancipation to consider the legal phenomena underlying a narrative that is at once familial and, as Christina Sharpe points out, profoundly historical.4 In Brazil emancipation was enacted through piecemeal reforms from 1871 until 1888, when the Golden Law fully abolished slavery. I explain how the Free Womb Law, the first of several gradual emancipation laws, preserved partus by recognizing the daughters of enslaved women in a strategic employment of gendered language. Even as the law abolished hereditary slavery and allowed enslaved women to claim maternal custody, its “womb-based logic” effectively held freeborn children in bondage by way of their mother’s status.5 My subsequent analysis of the novel reinterprets making generations as a way of counteracting the legal forces that perpetuate Corregidora’s mastery beyond the time of slavery. I...

From free womb to criminalized woman: fertility control in Brazilian slavery and freedom

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the abolition of slavery affected the prosecution of abortion and infanticide in Rio de Janeiro. Analysing judicial documents, criminal and civil legislation, and travel writings, it demonstrates that the state did not prosecute enslaved women for fertility control due to the contradictory legal status of their bodies as both property and person. After abolition, the state prosecuted all women, but particularly poor women of colour, for these crimes. The article argues that as patriarchal control over women’s reproductive capabilities moved from the private to the public sphere, fertility control became a central axis on which the state articulated gendered and racialized power.

Segurando brasas: “pensamento mítico” sobre a infância de ventre livre de uma rainha negra no Rio Grande do Sul

Resumo: O artigo analisa uma lenda sobre uma criança nascida de ventre livre, Maria Tereza Joaquina, assim como a repercussão daquela história nas gerações subsequentes. Já adulta, ela foi rainha Jinga, nas décadas de 1950, 1960 e 1970, do maçambique de Osório, folguedo popular afrocatólico do litoral do Rio Grande do Sul. Será enfocada a interação entre “pensamento mítico”, memória e história. Segundo o relato da própria rainha, ela havia segurado brasas em sua infância a fim de ajudar o senhor de sua mãe a acender cigarros de palheiro. Confronto a versão por ela narrada ao jornalista, folclorista e antropólogo Norton Corrêa em 1980 com relatos similares de seus netos durante a década de 2010. Estudo seus papéis nas concepções de escravidão e liberdade e seu impacto na identidade familiar.