Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Nineteenth-Century Historiography of Brazil

Abstract: This special issue examines how Brazilian historians have engaged with legal sources to reconstruct the experiences of Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in nineteenth-century Brazil. Since the 1980s, historians of Brazil have been asking new questions about the workings of the law, achieving nuanced understandings of enslavement, freedom, and the changing meanings of race over time. That scholarship led to Brazilian contributions to the “social history of the law,” in which courts were important arenas of contestation and power struggle. Grounded in close readings of the archival sources, the Brazilian contribution to nineteenth-century historiography has extended far beyond mere understanding of the Brazilian context or comparison with U.S. scholarship. Instead, these works have critically challenged traditional concepts of race, highlighting actions by enslaved and freed Afro-Brazilians that questioned established racial hierarchies and expanded notions of rights and social expectations.