Yuko Miki. Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History
of Postcolonial Brazil. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2018.
xix + 292 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-41750-1.
Reviewed by Jayson Maurice Porter (Northwestern University)
Published on H-Borderlands (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Maria de los Angeles Picone
_Frontiers of Citizenship_ recounts how the experiences of black and
indigenous people of the Atlantic forest reconfigured the concepts of
race and citizenship in postcolonial Brazil (1822-89). Yuko Miki
insists that the violent formation of frontier settlements in this
region influenced the ideas and practices of race and nation.
Settlers encroached on three interconnected frontiers: those of black
_quilombos_, Botocudo territories, and the forest itself. They
intended to establish wage labor until engendering war against
Botocudo groups (1808-31), at which point they enslaved indigenous
prisoners of war instead. Settlers also captured _afrodescendientes_
but many soon escaped, formed quilombo communities, and increasingly
undermined plantations. In this frontier region, settler conflict
with both groups broadly shifted practices of exclusion and
inclusion. This exclusion and inequality for Miki was "embedded in
the very construction of an inclusive nationhood and citizenship,"
and, as a result, the "frontier was the very space in which the
relationship between race, nation, and citizenship [was] daily tested
and defined" (pp. 5, 8).
Slavery is the pivot around which Miki connects black, indigenous,
and settler experiences in this period of postcolonial Brazil. The
historiography of slavery in Brazil tends to ignore many indigenous
experiences in postcolonial Brazil, but Miki tracks Botocudo trials
through war, enslavement, and resistance. More than merely highlight
a region with indigenous slavery, Miki also demonstrates how the
latter affected enslaved black people and quilombolas. Foregrounding
slavery helps Miki show the "contingent and surprising ways in which
black and indigenous and histories overlapped shaped each other" (p.
12). By focusing on postcolonial laws and settler expansion, Miki
shows how legal and spatial paths to citizenship that appear parallel
actually separate at critical times and places. Therefore, by taking
indigenous slavery seriously, Miki connects two subaltern histories
through law, violence, and space-making processes.
Chapter 1 sets the tone through a legal analysis of land seizure,
enslavement, and resettlement. Liberals hoped to settle "forbidden
lands" with Swiss and German coffee growers, but pacification
preceded planting. They imagined settlement could save their new
nation from slavery, but the "violence of frontier incorporation"
created settlements built by enslaved afrodescendientes on the land
of the reenslaved Indians (p. 98). From frontier settlements, such as
Colônia Leopoldina and São Mateus, Miki shifts to parliamentary
debates to demonstrate how a region touted for settler-grown coffee
propagated slavery instead. Formal war (1808-31) against the Botocudo
inhabitants of the region operated through laws, which usurped land
and reclassified prisoners of war as enslaved citizens. Miki tracks
the formation of these laws to show the relationship between
enslavement and limited citizenship. Before the war, policymakers
only considered _aldeia_ villagers and afrodescendientes as "members
of society" (p. 30). As prisoners of war, however, the Botocudo
became legal members of Brazilian society. Parliamentary officials
believed that such members of society were not fully Brazilian
citizens but _merely Brazilians_ (Miki's emphasis). More membership
than citizenship, Miki leaves no question that the status of being
merely Brazilian was tied to practices of slavery and settlement in
the frontier.
Chapter 2 frames quilombola mobility and space making as resistance
to slavery. In the wake of the Botocudo Wars in 1831, quilombo
communities became the newest concern for policymakers and settlers
in the frontier. Parallel to the indigenous struggle, quilombo
revolts began to escalate in the 1820s; as planters imported more
enslaved people to their new settlements, more quilombolas freed
themselves and expanded into the frontier's regions of refuge. This
became so common that policymakers formed militias to carry out new
anti-quilombo laws and expeditions. Building on Edward Said, Flávio
dos Santos Gomes, and Stephanie Camp, Miki argues these quilombolas
developed insurgent geographies, where "they reimagined their lives
as free people within the very geography in which they were intended
to remain enslaved" (p. 174).
If geography helps Miki explain quilombola self-emancipation, popular
royalism and militias allow her to highlight indigenous social
mobility. Both black and indigenous people observed debates over the
status of slavery in modern Brazil and extended loyalty to royal
figures in exchange for imagined rights or privileges. However,
aldeia villagers were the principal source of militias. To be clear,
_Frontiers of Citizenships_ is not about solidarity. Guido Pokrane,
an indigenous militia leader, best demonstrates how armed service
could pit indigenous people against quilombolas. Pokrane spearheaded
anti-quilombo expeditions at the behest of the state, and eventually
the state granted his son the authority to lead another generation of
aldeia assaults on quilombos.
Miki does not suggest that the official status of aldeia villages was
secure, much less benign. Shifting focus to the myth of indigenous
extinction in Brazil, chapters 3 and 4 show the rise and fall of the
aldeia village systems, respectively. In chapter 3, national
miscegenation policy promoted the formation of new aldeias, whereas
chapter 4 tracks how policymakers endorsed racial logics after the
rise of scientific racism to violently reverse Indian policy through
_matar uma aldeia_. The aldeia once represented for many the
abolition of indigenous slavery. However, using the Nok Nok massacre
in 1881 as an example of _matar uma aldeia_, Miki posits that
practices of abolition were fickle, uneven, and often unforgiving.
Miki reiterates this point in regard to afrodescendiente abolition in
the final chapter.
Miki marshals an array of historical records to reexamine nation and
citizenship, slavery and abolition. However, in chapter 5 Miki
foregrounds geography to show how black "insurgent geographies"
created senses of belonging independent of citizenship. Miki reminds
us that citizenship was just one possible result of black freedom
struggle. For quilombolas on the Atlantic frontier, space making
influenced nation building, but that was seldom quilombolas' goal.
Like Aisha Finch's work on enslaved communication networks in
nineteenth-century Cuba, Miki incorporates gender analysis in Said's
spatial "rival geographies." Through local sources on quilombos in
São Mateus, Miki describes how quilombola women used knowledge of
the frontier to supplant authorities, and, in so doing, provides a
welcome contribution to growing scholarship on black geographies.
Given Miki's emphasis on racial and geographic frontiers, are there
sources detailing indigenous forms of insurgent geographies? While
Miki reserves most of the discussion on geography to quilombolas,
would a similar analysis offer a better explanation of the Botocudo
wars from the indigenous perspective? Like quilombolas, how did
Indians use the forest or local knowledge to repel settler expansion
and escape reenslavement?
Would an ecological analysis of the Atlantic frontier help illuminate
how both black and indigenous peoples made new spaces of political
possibilities? Miki asserts that "Botocudo" was an actors' category
used to reference several indigenous groups in the area, but is less
clear about the Atlantic frontier consisting of many ecosystems (pp.
17, 79). Miki suggests that nineteenth-century Brazil had many
frontiers wherein nation and citizenship were made and remade, but
does it matter that there were also many frontiers within this
Atlantic frontier? For instance, three types of subtropical forests
share the region where the three states of Minas Gerais, Bahia, and
Espiritu Santo meet the Atlantic Ocean: wet, moist, and dry forests.
Located just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, these coastal forests
flickered between tropical and savanna patterns. Even though planters
located coffee plantations in moist forests, they displaced Botocudos
from the Aimoré's predominately dry forests. Did Botocudo geographic
and botanical knowledge extend evenly across these forests? Did
knowledge of dry forest ecologies help indigenous people form their
own insurgent geographies? Were Botocudos relocated to wetter forests
more susceptible to smallpox in the 1830s?
In any case, Miki offers a convincing study of frontier settlement in
postcolonial Brazil that demonstrates how the connected histories of
black and indigenous exclusion inform the study of nation and
citizenship in Brazil. _Frontiers of Citizenship_ will be well
received by scholars of race, borderlands, and nation building, and,
in turn, serve as a model study for an emerging generation of
scholars investigating race, geography, and identity formation in
borderlands.
Citation: Jayson Maurice Porter. Review of Miki, Yuko, _Frontiers of
Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil_.
H-Borderlands, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54368
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
