Martin Jean opens her book with four mid-nineteenth-century photographs of prisoners from Rio de Janeiro's penitentiary system. The images reveal unsmiling, stern faces, staring determinedly, even defiantly, at something just to the side of the photographer (or the viewer). Though reminiscent of other collections of nineteenth-century photographic portraits, and to some extent of contemporary photographic self-portraits (or selfies), these images had a very distinct purpose. Rather than record a carefully curated representation of the self—as was the case with Frederick Douglass's many photographs—they were part of a state registry that aimed to render legible the inadequacies and criminal propensity of Brazil's working poor. The fact that three of the four portraits were of persons of African origin or descent is no coincidence. It illustrates Jean's argument that Brazil's postcolonial penal system evolved alongside the young nation's struggles with Atlantic abolitionist pressures, citizenship for its racially diverse population, and the labor needs of its plantation economy and modernization project.
The book's five chapters offer a rich—if at times long and insufficiently edited—discussion of post-independence citizenship, modernization, abolitionism, and policing and incarceration practices in nineteenth-century Brazil. Jean walks us through the historical developments that tied Afro-Brazilians’ right to citizenship to demonstrable industriousness and occupational skills in chapter 1. In chapter 2, she explains Brazil's embrace of punitive labor regimes as a tool of social control at a time when efforts to abolish the slave trade produced a population of illegally trafficked Africans liberated by the courts. Chapter 3 examines the insurmountable obstacles imposed on the full freedom of liberated Africans and their subjection to forced apprenticeships and service to both public and private enterprises. The exploitation of their unfree labor in support of infrastructure projects and urban jobs enabled, she argues, the geographical relocation of slavery to plantations and its entrenchment in Brazil's labor policies. Chapter 4 turns its attention to liberated African and Afro-Brazilian children and their experience with the occupational training institute established within Rio de Janeiro's penitentiary. Set up to prepare an underprivileged, black youth for productive citizenship, the institute helped to stigmatize them as potential delinquents, further racializing the poor. Finally, chapter 5 uses select biographies to reveal the cycle of incarceration Africans endured as their pursuit of a full freedom on their own terms was met with police surveillance of their labor, social lives, and leisure time.
Jean thus narrates the efforts political and economic elites made to preserve slavery in the hinterland and to create a compliant, free workforce in coastal urban centers amid the uncertainties of the 1830s to 1860s. Those decades encompassed the first legal attempts to end the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, the final, successful abolition of the trade, and liberated African's fight for the full freedom. The establishment of a penitentiary complex organized around punitive labor regimes and occupational training became one answer to the contentious issue of enslaved labor and black freedom. These prisons were meant to transform their inmates, some convicted criminals, others liberated Africans, into productive Brazilians worthy of citizenship. In the process, Jean argues, they helped to police the freedom of the country's unprivileged classes. Ultimately, the systemic confinement of black men, women, and children documented in prisoner portraits and other registries recasts a global abolitionist and liberal moment under a revealing new light. Jean's analysis of this moment, and her closing discussion of the prison photograph and petition for freedom of Rufino, a liberated African, highlight the cruel continuities that marked the transition from slave to free, colonial to postcolonial societies, and their devastating impact on Black Atlantic lives.
