Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony by Peter M. Beattie (review)

During the early 2000s, I took a graduate course on nineteenth-century Latin American history. The syllabus included only one book on Brazil, a reflection not only of the professor's specialization (Spanish America) but also of the relative absence—well known among Brazilianists—of English-language works that examine nineteenth-century Brazil from what we then called a "subaltern" perspective. This lacuna has been addressed in important ways over the last decade and a half, and much of the recent literature derives directly or indirectly from the single Brazilianist monograph on that turn-of-the-millennium syllabus: Peter Beattie's The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945 (Duke, 2001).

In The Tribute of Blood, Beattie crafted an expansive narrative of the Brazilian military and forged new ground in the study of masculinity, honor, race, class, and punishment. Punishment in Paradise explores some of the same themes while adding new ones, all in an innovative, provocative way. Where The Tribute of Blood used a sprawling entity (the military) as its lens, Punishment in Paradise focuses on a much smaller institution, the penal colony on Fernando de Noronha Island, and expands outward. The book's global reach continues an ongoing project, elaborated in these pages several years ago, to "Re-Capricorn the Atlantic," and its many contributions to national historiography resemble the rich collection of points enumerated in The Tribute of Blood.

Fernando de Noronha's idyllic setting serves as an incongruous backdrop for the island's transformation from "remote dot on the [Portuguese] map" (23), to a Dutch possession (and later a French West India Company outpost), a sparsely populated exile settlement, and finally, home to the "largest concentration of convicts from across the Brazilian Empire" (1). The island's majestic scenery drew predictable scorn from Brazilians and foreigners alike, who mocked the idea that a serious penal institution could exist in such a setting. Of course, life on "Fernando" was hardly the "ocean resort" that one traveler called it (1). In addition to brutal labor and squalid quarters, droughts and the lack of fresh water produced dire conditions.

Beattie places Noronha within larger debates about flogging, capital punishment, and slavery that ultimately combined to secure for Brazil the dubious distinction as last nation in the hemisphere to abolish slavery and one of the first to eliminate the death penalty. This paradox was symptomatic of the legal and discursive wrangling over the rights of the state and of slave masters to inflict beatings, to kill, and to keep men and women as chattel while living in a putatively liberal, enlightened monarchy. By-products of this system include the penal colony's flourishing maracatu and carnaval groups (chapter 6); a colony commander who became indebted to slave convicts (chapter 1); and a former slave who arrived at Noronha as a free convict (a paradoxical category if ever there was one), remained silent about his "ex-slave" status, and then, after the abolition of slavery, sent for his letter of liberty, which arrived from São Paulo and helped secure his release from the island (chapter 8).

Punishment in Paradise uses stories such as these to create a detailed sketch of life on Noronha, whose abundant records provide what Beattie convincingly describes as "an unparalleled panorama of justice in imperial Brazil" (4), one that includes not only the kind of details available in more standard criminal archives, but also a unique look at life inside an institution that Beattie understands as a metaphor for society at large (4–5). The different social groups present, not only convicts but also officials and families of both, represent a cross-section of what Beattie calls the "intractable poor": "convicts, slaves, military enlisted men, Indians in government-organized villages, and free Africans" (5). These groups occupied different degrees of "unfreeness" (5), a condition constantly negotiated on Noronha...