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Reviewed by:
  • Tornando-se livre: Agentes históricos e lutas sociais no processo de abolição ed. by Maria Helena P. T. Machado, Celso Thomas Castilho
  • Roderick J. Barman
Maria Helena P. T. Machado, Celso Thomas Castilho. Tornando-se livre: Agentes históricos e lutas sociais no processo de abolição. São Paulo: Edusp, 2015. 480 pp. Notes. References. Figures. Contributors.

Slavery was integral to the society and economy of nineteenth-century Brazil, a subject so significant as to make welcome the appearance of any new research work on the topic. This volume, mainly composed of papers given at a conference at São Paulo University in 2011, provides a diversity of insights into the dynamics of slavery during the final decades of its existence. The principal themes covered by the twenty-one contributions are (1) the interaction between slaves (mostly women) and their owners, (2) the intermediate condition between freedom and slavery (particularly following the passage of the Law of Free Birth in 1871), and (3) the groupings that worked for slave emancipation. In terms of geographical coverage, most of the contributions relate to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but there are also several focusing on Bahia and Recife, with one on the Far North and another on Rio Grande do Sul.

In respect to content, the great majority of the contributions involve close studies of specific incidents or institutions, with only two considering larger themes. What makes this approach explicable is the fact that most of the contributors were at the time of publication just embarking on their careers as academics, no less than one third still completing their doctorates. Many of the contributions are in consequence quite fresh and innovative. To make the best of these qualities, the volume itself needs to be tightly organized and focused on the three major themes identified above. The inclusion of contributions that are either peripheral at best, such as Maria Clara Sales Carneiro Sampaio's study of proposals for Afro-American colonization in Brazil and Central America (405–29), or reprints of published articles (that of Cynthia Cowling in Social History), unnecessarily bulks out what is already a long and quite diffuse work. Similarly, neither the rationale behind the first two sections—Disputando Liberdades and Disputando Liberdades: Histórias de mulheres com seus filhos—nor the assignment of contributions between the two can be termed conceptually strong. Children are not, for example, critical to Endilice Bertin's study of Maria, a "preta de caráter feroz" (129–41) in section II.

These characteristics do not in the final analysis affect the intrinsic value of a work that offers stimulating and well-grounded insights into the evolving nature of slavery in Brazil during the decades before its abolition in May 1888. Readers who take the time and effort to investigate the contributions will find themselves well rewarded. [End Page E5]

Roderick J. Barman
University of British Columbia
rbarman@mail.ubc.ca
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