White Freedom, Black Bondage: Race, Reproduction, & Technologies of Belonging

In 1761, Portugal was decreed “free soil.” This meant that all newly arrived enslaved Africans would, upon touching the land, see their legal status changed. Vested in the language of humanity, the 1761 free soil law and the 1773 free wombs laws exposed, instead, deep-seated commitments to perpetuating slavery in the South Atlantic and the role that regulating wombs played in hardening and “relaxing” hereditary slavery. This talk historicizes how Black freedom in metropolitan Portugal served to pathologize Blackness and render Black people into targets of police supervision. Tracking the contingent meanings of race (raça) over time, white status signified freedom and wage labor, thus rendering Blackness incommensurate with the Portuguese body politic. Attending to the invention of the population as a category in the eighteenth century, this talk explores how abolition was a whitening project.