The Boundaries of Freedom brings together, for the first time in English, writings on the social and cultural history of Brazilian slavery, emphasizing the centrality of slavery, abolition, and Black subjectivity in the forging of modern Brazil. Nearly five million enslaved Africans were forced to Brazil's shores over four and a half centuries, making slavery integral to every aspect of its colonial and national history, stretching beyond temporal and geographical boundaries. This book introduces English-language readers to a paradigm-shifting renaissance in Brazilian scholarship that has taken place in the past several decades, upending longstanding assumptions on slavery's relation to law, property, sexuality and family; reconceiving understandings of slave economies; and engaging with issues of agency, autonomy, and freedom. These vibrant debates are explored in fifteen essays that place the Brazilian experience in dialogue with the afterlives of slavery worldwide. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

'… an excellent book for both specialists and graduate students, certain to generate new questions about slavery, emancipation, and race in a key space of the Atlantic world.' Isadora Moura Mota, Hispanic American Historical Review

Brodwyn Fischer is Professor of Latin American History at the University of Chicago. She has won awards from the Social Science History Association, the Urban Studies Association, the Brazilian Studies Association, and the Conference on Latin American History. She has authored two books, A Poverty of Rights (2008) and Cities from Scratch (2014). Keila Grinberg is Professor of Latin American and Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a specialist on slavery and race in the Atlantic World. Her book A Black Jurist in a Slave Society (2019) was a finalist for the 2020 Frederick Douglass Prize.