Peter M. Beattie

Born Under the Cruel Rigor of Captivity, the Supplicant Left it Unexpectedly by Committing a Crime: Categorizing and Punishing Slave Convicts in Brazil, 1830–1897

In Jose Lins do Regos 1936 novel, A Usina (the sugar refinery), the penal colony of Fernando de Noronha Island emerges as an incongruous Utopia. The novels young black protoganist Ricardo serves a three year sentence there as a result of his involvement in a Recife labor strike. Upon his return, he is disillusioned by what he finds on the mainland. He recalls his penalcolony stint with a mixture of nostalgia and shame, especially the tender relationship he had had with the former black bandit Ze Moleque, the respected convict in the citation above. The island, some 220 miles off Brazils northeast coast, initially appears to be an exotic criminal community of dishonored men, the antithesis of life on the mainland. But, as the plot progresses, it becomes a bucolic foil with which the author highlights hypocrisy, injustice, indifference, and corruption on the modernizing Brazilian mainland of the 1920s.No presídio [de Fernando de Noronha] o bandido [Zé Moleque] criara fama de boa pessoa, de trabalhador. Os seus roçados de farinha eram sempre os maiores e nunca estivera em cela, nunca dera o que fazer aos diretores. In José Lins do Regos 1936 novel, A Usina (the sugar refinery), the penal colony of Fernando de Noronha Island emerges as an incongruous Utopia. The novels young black protoganist Ricardo serves a three year sentence there as a result of his involvement in a Recife labor strike. Upon his return, he is disillusioned by what he finds on the mainland. He recalls his penalcolony stint with a mixture of nostalgia and shame, especially the tender relationship he had had with the former black bandit Zé Moleque, the respected convict in the citation above. The island, some 220 miles off Brazils northeast coast, initially appears to be an exotic criminal community of dishonored men, the antithesis of life on the mainland. But, as the plot progresses, it becomes a bucolic foil with which the author highlights hypocrisy, injustice, indifference, and corruption on the modernizing Brazilian mainland of the 1920s.

Land, Protest, and Politics: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil (review)

entry into how native cultures retained and communicated knowledge. As much as friars subscribed to the view that liturgical practices and public spectacles were a mechanism for religious inculturation and social solidarity, they ignored or, more likely, suppressed the degree to which it could open up resistant notions and intensify difference. Lara adopts some of these mendicant blindspots, insulating the activities he describes as though monasteries were self-contained universes immune to outside pressures and asymmetries of power. Thus, Lara restates his earlier conclusion, that is, worship had a more profound impact than political hegemony on the native population, without noting, in my view, that they are inseparable. Aware that native Americans were co-opting popular festivals to assert their own ethnic ancestry and claim certain prerogatives, colonial authorities were constantly on their guard that rituals not devolve into unseemly behavior, or worse, help instigate heretical or subversive activity. Although the dynamism of intercultural dialogue has been notoriously resistant to labeling, Lara has chosen to reinstate Hugo Nutini’s “guided syncretism,” a term that seems to underscore the unilateral intentionality of the European friar. And what of the unguided and random, the inadvertent and surreptitious, surely components that also characterize the high passions aroused by ritual activity?

Political Struggle, Ideology, and State Building: Pernambuco and the Construction of Brazil, 1817–1850 (review)

context of a weak and diffuse national government, popular sources represented Mexico and Mexicans along diverse ethnic, cultural, and geographic lines. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and accelerating during the second half of the Porfiriato (1876-1910), official campaigns sought to construct a homogenous, Europeanized representation of the population that would give the country a more modern and cosmopolitan appearance. These competing visions, Beezley argues, ultimately set the stage for the 1910 revolution.

Slaves, Crime, and Punishment in Imperial Brazil

The history of slave criminality in the Americas remains an area where unbroken ground abounds even in a nation with a well-developed literature on the history of slavery like Brazil. The recent works of Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira and Jodo Luiz Ribeiro have both cleared and hoed long rows in this developing subfield. Even though they treat virtually the same period, their approaches to slaves, crime, and punishment are distinctive and complementary. Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira offers a tightly focused regional case study on slaves and crime in and around the municipality of Franca, Sdo Paulo, whereas Jodo Luiz Ribeiro studies the punishment of slave criminals on an imperial scale with a focus on the rise and fall of the death penalty in Brazil. Ferreiras study examines slave crime in a region where there were relatively few bonds persons. Coffee cultivation came late to this northern part of Sdo Paulo state so the proportion of slaves in the local population ranged from a high of 33% of the population in 1826 to 16% in 1879. Most studies of slave criminality have up to now focused on major urban areas like Rio de Janeiro or core plantation areas like Campinas where wealthy masters often owned large numbers of slaves. Franca, however, was characterized by smaller farms where the large majority of masters did not amass great wealth and hold large numbers of slaves. In this sense, Franca is more representative of the predominant pattern of slave ownership in Brazil where most masters owned only one or at most a few slaves.