Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship argues that abolitionist organizing and advocacy in Brazil created new forms and expressions of political participation for men and women in the 1870s and 1880s beyond formal suffrage. Abolitionists, particularly after the 1871 Free Womb Law, took their demands for slave emancipation to the populace in assemblies at theaters, law schools, and public streets. Legislative halls and churches, traditional sites for speeches and elections, no longer constituted exclusive locales of formal political exchange. The struggle for abolition, which culminated with final emancipation on May 13, 1888, generated new spaces and modes of protest and thereby opened new pathways for political involvement. This book joins an expanding body of research aimed at rectifying the notion of formal voting alone as the primary measure of political participation across postindependence Latin America.
Celso Castilho details abolitionist organizing using a regionalist approach that emphasizes the province...
