This book is a must- read for historians of slave emancipation in Brazil. In revisiting the broad influence of juridical struggles for freedom during the first collective abolitionist mobilizations of the late 1860s, and then tracing the persisting force of such practices through the 1870s and early 1880s, Azevedo convincingly recasts the 20- year period of social struggle prior to the 1888 abolition law as significantly more fluid and interconnected than historians have previously allowed. In a word, Azevedo blurs the conventional periodization that separates the so- called legalistic or gradual phase (pre- 1880) of abolitionist activism from the better- known immediatist or radical stage (1880- 88). In one of the book’s best- developed sections, she shows that the politicization of freedom suits prior to the 1871 Free Womb Law had a similar galvanizing effect on popular activism as did the more familiar juridical struggles of the 1880s; both processes...
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