The translation into English by Kristin M. McGuire of Keila Grinberg's O fiador dos brasileiros (2002) as A Black Jurist in a Slave Society is a needed addition to the literature on race, citizenship, politics and the law in Latin America. The book makes available to Anglophone readers an important and empirically driven examination of the fault lines of race, slavery, citizenship and the law in the creation of modern Brazil through the political and legislative career of Antônio Pereira Rebouças, a free man of colour in a society that thrived on slave labour. Brazil specialists are well familiar with Grinberg's research, which has been published in Portuguese and English in journals, as book chapters and as monographs. Her careful study of freedom lawsuits by the enslaved in Liberata: A lei da ambigüidade (1994) sheds light on slaves’ understanding of Brazilian legal culture and their uses of the law to expand access to freedom. The product of her PhD thesis, Grinberg's biography of Rebouças engages with important debates on the inherent tensions between liberalism and slavery and their significance to postcolonial state formation in Latin America.
Readers expecting to learn about the political trajectory of a ‘black jurist’ in Rebouças will be disappointed because, as Grinberg makes clear in her analysis, the Brazilian lawmaker did not self-identify as ‘black’. Throughout his political career and in his personal choices Rebouças affirmed a de-racialised understanding of Brazilian citizenship through his defence of private property including chattel slavery and equality of civil rights for all free Brazilians regardless of colour. Brazilian society, especially political opponents and white Brazilians, often picked on Rebouças's mixed-race ancestry to challenge his defence of equal citizenship and inclusion for free Brazilians of colour like himself while questioning his commitment to the nation. Rebouças personally experienced racism and exclusion on various occasions but did not capitalise on these experiences to articulate a critique of Brazilian liberalism grounded in racial consciousness. And there lies the tension between liberalism, race and slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil that Grinberg's research approaches from a concrete angle grounded in the empirical evidence of Rebouças's life and career.
A Black Jurist probes these tensions and themes in three parts entitled ‘Civil Rights’, ‘Civil Rights and Liberalism’, and ‘Civil Rights and Civil Law’. The first part is the most biographical as it discusses Rebouças's origin as the son of a Portuguese immigrant and a pardo woman from Salvador, Bahia province. As Grinberg argues, the identification of Rebouças's mother as pardo ‘connects her directly to a slave past’, though it signalled that she was born free (p. 14). The family tried to distance itself from its probable slave origin by migrating into the Bahian interior when Rebouças was a child and seeking social mobility through education. Rebouças taught himself the law and with this knowledge secured a licence to practise in Salvador by 1820. Education, as Grinberg demonstrates with the Rebouças brothers pursuing careers in law as well as medicine and classical music, completed their refashioning as upwardly mobile pardos.
Antônio Pereira Rebouças became an important protagonist in Brazil's transition to postcolonial nationhood. He moved to the Brazilian capital (at the time Rio de Janeiro), made contacts with important political figures like the Andradas brothers and even met with the Emperor. Yet Grinberg's analysis demonstrates that he could go only so far in a society where skin colour was tied to slavery. It was in Rio that the issue of Rebouças's colour was first raised by white Brazilians to question his commitment to the slave order. He was at times barred from access to the intimate social spaces of the white Brazilian political class. Although – as noted above and recorded by Grinberg – he experienced other instances of racism, his diary mentioned only that one example, evidence of his difficulty engaging with this painful reminder of the limits imposed on non-white Brazilians like himself.
Rebouças embraced the colour blindness of liberalism and affirmed throughout his career a commitment to the protection of private property. As Brazil transitioned from colony to postcolonial nation state as a constitutional monarchy, Rebouças espoused liberalism's promise of emancipation because it afforded the possibility of civil rights for free mixed-race persons like himself. Rebouças's and his brothers’ social mobility discursively bolstered the claim and the belief that with education and hard work ‘any pardo or preto can be a General’ (pp. 25–7). But as Parts II and III of A Black Jurist demonstrate, Rebouças's political opponents branded him as a black man, sympathetic to the enslaved and a threat to the slaveholding class. He was called the ‘grandson of Queen Njinga’ (p. 31) to suggest that he was a threat to the slaveholding economy or that he harboured anti-slavery sentiments. In the legislative chamber (Rebouças was first elected to the legislature in 1828 and represented Bahia in the 1830s and 1840s), he staunchly opposed those who tried to assert the colour line to prevent free people of colour from joining the National Guard. He supported an 1837 bill to repeal the law of 7 November 1831 which had banned the slave trade to Brazil. As is well known, the traffic continued unabated after 1831 despite its prohibition. Meanwhile, there were discussions about facilitating European immigration to Brazil to replace slave labour and ‘whiten’ the population. The 1837 bill thus sought to bar free blacks from entering the country (p. 78). Rebouças supported the 1837 bill on economic grounds but critiqued the prohibition on the immigration of free black workers. Despite his support for free black immigration, Rebouças was a consummate defender of slavery in that he asserted the property rights of slaveholders and represented in court some who sought to retrieve their fugitive captives. It would have been instructive for the author to delve more into the class aspect of this story and its intersection with race.
Rebouças married the daughter of a Bahian merchant and owned domestic slaves himself; as such he was personally involved in the system as a property holder. Grinberg could have added to the discussion of Rebouças's defence of private property and slavery by integrating it with new research that documents slave ownership by ex-slaves and free people of colour.
The translation of Grinberg's biography of Rebouças adds to the biographical turn in Atlantic studies which seek to recover the black experience in slavery and freedom in the Americas in all its nuances. Rebouças was not a revolutionary figure with a black consciousness. Yet, he had to wrestle with race and liberalism as a lawmaker. He made choices and supported causes that should challenge historians of race and nation to engage more critically with racial identity, agency and conservatism. Beautifully translated, Grinberg's biography is recommended reading for scholars of race, slavery and nation in the African diaspora.
