ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: SLAVE LEGACIES, AMBIVALENT ...

ways of exploring [the] multiplicity of transnational experiences and relations.” 4
Street commerce brought together a variety of diasporic communities along
ethnic, gender, and class lines, transforming it into a transnational practice and
space.
The end of slavery and the turn to free labor in the nineteenth-century
Atlantic world revised notions of legitimate labor, public order, and citizenship.
For example, several post-slave societies, such as Brazil and Jamaica, drafted new
legal and criminal codes once slavery ended as a way of managing black and
former enslaved populations, now free laborers and citizens. 5 The disciplinary
regulation of street behavior had been developing since the era of slavery 6 , and
this study reveals that many vendors in Rio had already experienced changes in
the regulation of public order via criminal law at least a decade before the
abolition of slavery in 1888 and the institution of the Penal Code in 1890 – a
seemingly inaugural document of the newly founded Brazilian republic. In other
words, during the last decade of slavery, municipal authorities were increasingly
regulating street behavior deemed “criminal,” such as vagrancy, public disorder,
theft, and inebriation, while becoming less concerned with regulating the
commercial activity of buying and selling on the street. The shift from the
4
Peter Jackson, Philip Crang, and Claire Dwyer, ed. Transnational Spaces (New York: Routledge,
2004).
5
Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-
1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law:
Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004); Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, ed. Gender and Slave Emancipation in
the Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt,
and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in
Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
6
Maria Tereza Chaves de Mello, A República consentida (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio
Vargas, 2007).
4