Manifestations of Personhood. Self-Descriptions of Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Final Report Abstract
In nineteenth-century Brazil thousands of enslaved and formerly enslaved women and men appealed to court to claim their right to freedom or that of family members. Together with a lawyer they developed an argumentation strategy that included autobiographical anecdotes, life experiences, and memories of earlier incidents so as to convince the authorities that they had the right to freedom. These court room stories offer a unique insight into the life realities and perspectives of the (formerly) enslaved persons on the one hand and depict a very specific fight for freedom on the other. From a narratological perspective, this extremely rich corpus of sources constitutes an enormous collection of stories about and especially against the enslavement system from a mainly enslaved perspective. By analyzing in depth approximately 30 court actions, the book describes the courts as a space where specific narratives against the enslavement system emerged. While research on abolition in Brazil has concentrated on public discourse, legal order, actions of enslaved people and the concrete outcome of legal suits, the book proposes to give more attention to the discursive space of courts. The legal narratives of the courts were different from that of the public sphere because in court enslaved and formerly enslaved people could and did interfere in the way educated people wrote and thought about enslavement. They were active co-producers of narratives about the enslavement system.
