Keila Grinberg - A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

One of the central goals of historians inspired by the social movements of the past half-centurymovements organized around race, gender, sexualityhas been to rescue from historical oblivion the lives and significance of individuals who were not white, male, and upper class. More recently, historians have sought to go beyond what some have critically called a salvage operation to consider how the writings and deeds of these previously forgotten individuals impel us to rethink our notions of the past and of the very identities that made us interested in our research subjects in the first place. Keila Grinbergs magisterial study of Antonio Pereira Rebouas and the political and juridical worlds that he inhabited and shaped is a stellar example of a work that both restores a remarkable individual to his rightful place as a historically significant figure and goes far beyond a simple act of recuperation to illuminate the tensions and contradictions of the Brazilian nation-building project.

At first glance, it seems incredible that Antonio Pereira Rebouas would have been in need of rescue at all since he was undoubtedly one of the most visible and influential men of acknowledged African descent in any slave society in the Americas. He was an eminent jurist, an advisor to the emperor, an elected legislator; to identify a man of color of similar prominence in the nineteenth-century United States, we would have to cite someone such as Frederick Douglass, a familiar figure to anyone with even a passing interest in African American history. But perhaps the juxtaposition of Rebouas and Douglass can help us understand why the former languished in relative obscurity until the publication of Keila Grinbergs book, as well as why his son, the noted engineer and celebrated abolitionist Andr Rebouas, is much better known to students of Brazilian history than his father. While Douglass was himself a man of great complexity and occasional contradictions, he undeniably corresponds to some of our principal expectations with regard to prominent black historical actors, having escaped from bondage and then become an implacable foe of slavery and a crusader for the rights of African Americans and women. Whatever his particular idiosyncrasies, Frederick Douglass certainly qualifies as a champion of the oppressed.

Antonio Pereira Rebouas, on the other hand, presents a genuine challenge to our standard expectations, as Keila Grinbergs study makes evident. Not only was he never a slave (which was true of many Afro-descendants in early nineteenth-century Brazil), but he never spoke out against slavery, regarding it as a property relation protected by the liberal legal precepts that he held dear. What he did oppose, consistently and vociferously, was a racialized justification for slavery, and any form of bias or disadvantage based on racial difference. Throughout his career as a lawyer, writer, and politician, he championed the claims of both descendants of slaves and ex-slaves to full citizenship. Yet even though he himself suffered various political attacks and personal slights because of his color, and clearly spoke from his position as a racialized person, he insisted on divorcing the problem of race from the problem of slavery, or at least attempted to do so. Furthermore, he collaborated in the repression of popular political revolts and defended the rights of slaveholders to their human property. In other words, it would be difficult to venerate Antonio Pereira Rebouas as a champion of the oppressed. Fortunately, the historian who took on the crucial task of exploring his role in Brazils political and legal construction did so not to create a transcendent hero, but to consider how his ideas and actions and his personal trajectory reflected a central problem of the new Brazilian nationthe tension between liberalism and the persistence of human enslavement.

Given Rebouass insistence on the irrelevance of race in the allocation of rights, one can appreciate why liberalism, with its promise of equality before the law, appealed to him, but also why, given his precarious position in Brazilian circles of prestige and authority, he felt compelled to defend liberalism in all its connotations. Thus, even as he opposed the transatlantic slave trade and supported legal protections for slaves who sought to purchase their freedom, he never challenged the sanctity of private property, including in human flesh.