Hemispheric Connections: The American Civil War and Afro-Brazilian Geopolitical Imagination

Slave activism challenges preconceived notions of how the trajectories of Brazilian and American societies intersected in the late nineteenth century. Using their own channels of communication and relying on literate slaves with access to newspapers, Afro-Brazilians closely followed the American Civil War. The lessons they derived from this allowed them to put into practice a transnational citizenship with deep impact on Brazil’s abolitionist movement and political landscape. This paper examines the Afro-Brazilian geopolitical imagination during the 1860s by focusing on the communication networks that Brazilian slaves, freed blacks, and maroons developed to make sense of the Age of Emancipation. It argues that Brazilian emancipation was a long and conflicted process that came about through the efforts of many, including those of the enslaved, who developed a radical version of antislavery politics rooted in a geography of knowledge of hemispheric proportions.