Introduction

Summary

The introduction problematizes the interpretation of postemancipation Brazil from the perspective of slavery’s abolition in May 1888 as a temporal watershed to explore the making of race, nation, and citizenship for people of African descent and their intersection with policing, crime, and punishment. It reframes the history of nineteenth-century Brazil through the lens of policing freedom, which reckons with the systematic implementation of criminal justice reforms that defined the terrain of freedom and citizenship for racialized Brazilians of African descent while slavery thrived in Brazil. It brings attention to the significance of the penitentiary in incubating changes in labor relations in nineteenth-century Brazil and its deployment as a site for the racialization of the poor, while anchoring these local developments within a broader global transformation of the labor regime of the Atlantic World by historians of the “second slavery.”