Madness and Freedom; or, Color-Coding Insanity in Post-emancipation Brazil

Throughout the nineteenth century planters and officials in Brazil blamed ideas about political independence for “infecting” the minds of otherwise obedient slaves and turning them into would-be rebels.  The desire for freedom, in other words, induced mental disturbances.  As the century came to a close however, and the abolition of slavery became a reality, a new discourse unfolded that drew on the emerging professionalization of psychiatry and pharmacology in Europe and the Americas.  In this discourse blackness was linked to a series of mental deficiencies (psychosis, criminality, vagrancy), which in turn were often attributed to assumed biological inferiorities that had not been allowed to evolve due to slavery.  For writers and medical practitioners like Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, for example, Brazil’s path to achieving international respectability could not be secured solely by the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the subsequent proclamation of the first Brazilian Republic.  Instead, the road to modernity hinged on the country’s ability to curtail the element of “criminality” that was latent in the psyche of blacks and mulattos.  White genes needed to overpower black genes.  This was not just a question of beauty and aesthetics but of the nation’s psychic health.  Meanwhile, in the midst of such arguments, mental hospitals and prisons were simultaneously being erected across the landscape of Brazil, often housing recently freed individuals.  I am thus seeking to understand two things.  First, how was abolition constructed as a site for debating the relationship between madness and modernity at the dawn of the twentieth century in Brazil?  Secondly, how best to try and understand the relationship between these discourses of black mental illness, actual health issues affecting people of African descent, and the confinement of black bodies to asylums after emancipation?