"To See a Man’s Face": The Legal Importance of Nighttime in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, in Code and Practice

Amy Chazkel’s paper explores the tension between the codified criminal law and policing practice in early post-colonial Brazil, focusing on the Imperial Court of Rio de Janeiro. Rio in the nineteenth century is an especially interesting site to examine the question of competing jurisdictions and legalities; in addition to its sizeable enslaved population subject to an ambiguous balance of private and public power, the Imperial Court also had numerous africanos livres (technically but not really free people captured from Africa and brought to Brazil after the anti-slave trafficking treaties were signed in Britain in 1831 and 1850) and manumitted former slaves subject to reenslavement. In this context, this paper takes up a strand of Chazkel’s ongoing research on the legal and social history of night time in nineteenth-century urban Brazil. A different legal regime went into effect at nightfall, one that penalized certain (mostly African-descended) persons for being in the streets after the church bells would signal curfew. Most work on policing the streets of nineteenth-century Rio has focused on the arbitrary power given to police to make decisions at the moment of arrest to explain how these kinds of quasi-legal practices became institutionalized as legal culture. While nineteenth-century policing was indeed arbitrary, this paper turns instead to examine such practices as the nightly round of arrests for being out “after hours” to formal legal thought and jurisprudence, considering how these formed in dialogue with the “artisanal” practice of policing on the streets.