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ABSTRACT
Wood uses the graphic satirist Angelo Agostini in order to think about the fundamental differences that separate Brazilian abolition propaganda from the slavery propagandas produced in England and North America in the nineteenth century. He opens by setting out the fundamental elements that made Brazilian abolition different from that of the Anglo-American tradition. The lack of a North/South slave divide, the absence of women as activists, the lack of a tradition of slave narrative and the lack of any involvement from the Protestant church were all elements that contributed to a very different slavery inheritance. Wood argues that Brazilian critiques of slavery consequently contained intimate and satiric elements that were unique. He examines in detail the print satires that the Italo-Brazilian satiric lithographer Angelo Agostini produced in Rio in the decade immediately preceding the abolition law of 1888. The work that Agostini developed in the illustrated journal Revista Illustrada is shown to draw on a diverse semiotic inheritance in order to critique the shortcomings of various pieces of Brazil's slavery legislation. Wood analyses, in particular, Agostini's profound insights into the compromised nature of the Law of the Free Womb. Agostini and Brazilian print satire in general are shown to have an engagement with slavery and modernity, and with slavery and urban industrial culture, which is quite new. Wood ends by speculating on a possible connection between Agostini and William Hogarth in terms of the challenging and non-judgemental manner in which both artists were prepared to engage with the urban black populations of London in the mid-eighteenth century and Rio in the mid-nineteenth century.
Notes
1For historiography stressing the impact of Anglo-American abolition models on Brazil, see Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernisation in Brazil 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1968); Richard Graham, ‘Causes for the abolition of Negro slavery in Brazil: and interpretative history’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 46, no. 2, May 1966, 123–38; Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972); Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York: Atheneum 1972); Robert Brent Toplin, ‘Upheaval, violence, and the abolition of slavery in Brazil: the case of São Paulo’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 49, no. 4, November 1969, 639–55; Seymour Drescher, ‘Brazilian abolition in comparative perspective’, in Rebecca J. Scott (ed.), The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press 1988), 23–54.
2Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. from the Portuguese by Samuel Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988), 432–70; Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations, trans. from the French by Helen Sebba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), 40–4, 109–14, 348–57; Robert Conrad (ed.), Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1983), 154–203; for print satire viciously attacking the clergy over slavery, see Angelo Agostini, Os Bens dos Convertos, in Revista Illustrada, no. 575, 13 March 1884, 4–5.
3A year before abolition, Luís Anselmo da Fonseca published A escravidão, o clero e o abolicionismo (Bahia 1887). The book placed a strong new emphasis on black and mulatto liberation strategies but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that interest in this subject became serious. Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1942) introduced Fonseca's research to a wider audience. For subsequent studies that have greatly extended knowledge of black slave contributions to abolition in Brazil, see E. Bradford Burns, ‘Manuel Querino's interpretation of the African contribution to Brazil’, Journal of Negro History, vol. 59, no. 1, January 1974, 78–86, and Dorothy B. Porter, ‘The Negro in the Brazilian abolitionist movement’, Journal of Negro History, vol. 37, no. 1, January 1952, 52–80. The best overview of the subject is Dale Thurston Graden, ‘From Slavery to Freedom in Bahia, Brazil, 1791–1900’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Connecticut, 1991, 6–33, 352–77.
4For Gama, see James H. Kennedy, ‘Luiz Gama: pioneer of abolition in Brazil’, Journal of Negro History, vol. 59, no. 3, July 1974, 255–67; Sud Mennucci, O precursor do abolicionismo no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia editora nacional 1938); J. Romão da Silva, Luís Gama e suas poesias satíricas, 2nd edn (Rio: Livraria editora cátedra 1981); for the absence of slave narrative, see Herbert S. Klein, ‘The colored freedmen in Brazilian slave society’, Journal of Social History, vol. 3, no. 1, Fall 1969, 30–52.
5A. J. R. Russell-Wood, ‘Female and family in the economy of colonial Brazil’, in Asunción Lavrin (ed.), Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1978), 60–100; Ann M. Pescatello, Power and Pawn: The Female in Iberian Families, Societies and Cultures (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1976). For the cult of Isabella and the passage of the Golden Law, see Osvaldo Orico, O tigre da aboliçâo (Rio 1953), 149–61; Carolina Nabuco, The Life of Joaquim Nabuco, trans. Ronald Hilton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1950), 162–9.
6For ingenious compromises over slave trade legislation, see Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970) 242–64; for the actual workings of the Law of the Free Womb and the Law of the Sixty-Year-Olds, see Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 110–16; Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-century Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1990), 182–206; Fonseca, A escravidão, o clero e o abolicionismo, 147–82; and Graden, ‘From Slavery to Freedom in Bahia’, 274–7.
7David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1987); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2000); Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1996), 171–83.
8For a detailed analysis of British print satire on issues of race and slavery in 1840–65, see Marcus Wood, ‘The Deep South and English print satire 1750–1865’, in Joseph Ward (ed.), Britain and the American South from Colonialism to Rock and Roll (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 2003), 107–40.
9Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 324.
10This aspect of slavery propaganda has been neglected. It is thoughtfully analysed in the pioneering and speculative work, David Brion Davis, The Emancipation Moment, Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture (Gettysburg, PA: Gettysburg College 1983). A full critique emerges in three articles of mine discussing visual emancipation propaganda in the context of the 2007 bicentennial of the British Slave Trade Bill: ‘Packaging liberty and marketing the gift of freedom: 1807 and Clarkson's chest’, Parliamentary History, vol. 26, no. 1 (The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, a special issue ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin and James Walvin), May 2007; ‘Emancipation art, Fanon and “the butchery of Freedom”’, in Peter J. Kitson and Brycchan Carey (eds), Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, Essays and Studies Series (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer 2007); and ‘Popular graphic images of slavery and emancipation in nineteenth century England’, in Douglas Hamilton and Robert J. Blyth (eds), Representing Slavery: Art, Artefacts and Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum and Aldershot: Lund Humphries 2007); and in my forthcoming book, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Emancipation Fantasies 1807–1888 England, America, Brazil (Manchester University Press forthcoming).
11Even in Brazil very little work has been done on Agostini. There is a short assessment by José Luiz Werneck da Silva, ‘Ângelo Agostini. Oitenta anos depois’, Cadernos Brasileiros, no. 47 (a special issue, 80 Anos de Abolição), May–June 1968, and a technical discussion of his printmaking techniques in Orlando da Costa Ferreira, Imagem e letra: introdução à bibliologia brasileira: a imagem gravada (São Paulo: University of São Paulo Press 1994), 400–9.
12 Revista Ilustrada, no. 95, 22 December 1877, 4–5.
13Quoted in Silva, ‘Ângelo Agostini’, 32.
14 O Faisca, no. 37, 1886 (unpaginated).
15For an elaborate celebratory print commemorating the bill, see Agostini, Uma data gloriosa, in O Mequetrefe, no. 387, 30 September 1885, 4–5.
16For the distinction, see Robert Conrad, ‘Introduction’, in Joaquim Nabuco, Abolitionism: The Brazilian Antislavery Struggle, trans. from the Portuguese and ed. Robert Conrad (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1977), xxi.
17For the real effects of the Law of the Free Womb, see Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 110–16.
18 Revista Illustrada, no. 387, 31 July 1884, 4.
19 Revista Illustrada, no. 413, 1885, front cover.
20For the only scholarly discussion of O Faisca, see Graden, ‘From Slavery to Freedom in Bahia’, 344–6
21Thomas Wiedemann, Slavery, Greece and Rome: New Surveys in the Classics no. 19, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Classical Association 1997), 4.
22The European mythologization of Spartacus as a slave rebel icon began with the French Enlightenment; see Bernard Joseph Saurin, Spartacus (Paris 1760).
23 Pequeno dicionário brasileiro da língua portuguesa, 11th edn (Rio: Civilização Brasileira 1974): ‘Poste … espécie de coluna a que se prendiam os criminosos, expondo-os à ignominia pública’
24 O Faisca, no. 22, 1886, front cover.
25Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art from the American Revolution to World War I, vol. 4, part 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989), 48–9, 58–9, 78–9, 83–5, 164–6, 172–4; Wood, ‘Emancipation art, Fanon and “the butchery of Freedom”’.
26 Revista Illustrada, no. 491, 31 March 1888, 4–5.
27Reproduced in Werneck da Silva, ‘Ângelo Agostini’, 35.
28Jean Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, 3 vols (Paris 1834–9); Johann Moritz Rugendas, Malerische Reise in Brasilien (Paris: Engelmann 1835); Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, during Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green 1824).
29John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: Awnsham Churchill 1690).
30Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston 1861).
31Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks; Catherine Molineaux, ‘The Peripheries Within: Race, Slavery, and Empire in Early Modern England’, Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 2005.
34Nabuco, Abolitionism, 170.
32For Assis and ambivalence over the celebrations marking the Golden Law, see Giorgio Marotti, Black Characters in the Brazilian Novel, trans. from the Italian by Maria O. Marotti and Harry Lawton (Los Angeles: Centre for Afro-American Studies, University of California 1987), 97–131.
33For Nabuco's construction according to the tropes of Anglo-American abolition, see Nabuco, The Life of Joaquim Nabuco.