The Black Press and Black Political Formations in 19th-Century Brazil: Recife’s O Homem and the Problem of Abolition

This paper analyzes the process of black political formations in northeastern Brazil from the ephemeral press, drawing on the twelve-issue run of Recife's O Homem (1876), to probe a rare example of a Black political voice in the press. Despite Brazil’s large free population of color, it was unusual for Afro-Brazilians to make claims on public life in these racialized terms. Nevertheless, Afrodescendants had, of course, headed associations and brotherhoods, edited newspapers, and achieved elevated levels of social standing throughout the nineteenth century; yet, the Black press itself, insofar as a specific racial project, appears strikingly small when compared to the world of US African-American newspapers. While the little historical scholarship on O Homem has used it to highlight the prevailing racial discrimination of the time, I feel that a reassessment of this periodical can shed new light on the makings of a Black political identity on the one hand, and on the racialized boundaries of Brazilian citizenship, on the other. Rather than take O Homem for granted as a representation of a natural, or expected, means of social contestation, I historicize this reconstruction of blackness as it relates to the political and journalistic context of the 1870s. I have two objectives: the first entails delving deeper into the protagonists and the immediate networks that O Homem sought to mobilize as a way of understanding the social history of the ephemeral press. The second, more extensive, part of the paper reckons with how Black politics were articulated. It revisits a column entitled “The Gallery of the Men of Color” that appeared in most issues, to understand the national and historical terms of political belonging that O Homem claimed. Additionally, I also highlight the importance of the abolition debates, which dominated discussions in the latter issues, to the making of this Black public voice.