Frontiers of Citizenship

The nineteenth-century Brazilian Atlantic frontier is the central focus of Yuko Miki's pathbreaking book. In this region, which encompasses eastern Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, and southern Bahia, the Portuguese crown prohibited colonization of the nonlittoral sections for over 300 years. This changed in 1808, when King João VI opened these territories for conquest and settlement. As a result, ancient civilizations were decimated, a verdant rain forest was turned into a semiarid desert, and barbaric slave regimes were established. One of the great contributions of Frontiers of Citizenship is to document this plunder, about which most Brazilians have little knowledge. Miki's book also invaluably brings to light the historical depth of various facets of the Brazilian sociocultural terrain. It details the neocolonial desire to emulate Anglo modes of modernity, the construction of Brazilianness in opposition to nature and indigenous people, macroeconomic policies rooted in commodity export and savage labor conditions, and the imagining of people of color as dangerous or lazy vagabonds ever in need of disciplining. As such, Frontiers of Citizenship undercuts much of the conventional wisdom espoused by various pundits of Brazil, who often attribute these discourses and policies to more contemporary forces and thus fail to grasp how they predated neoliberal capitalism, social media, and US imperialism by at least a century.Miki also rightly questions popular imaginings and conventional historiography of quilombos, routinely thought of as communities of African-descent slaves (a point I return to below) who fled from planter society to create discrete societies. The quilombos that Miki studied do not fit this narrative. She observes how with tacit public knowledge “such quilombos were hidden in plain view” and received “protection, and some goods, in exchange for the labor they provided” (p. 176). In challenging the notion of quilombos as outside planter society, I felt that Miki missed an opportunity to also upset the concomitant view of them as sites of insurgency. What was striking to me as a sociologist was how eerily similar they seemed to contemporary favelas: sociogeographic spaces contiguous to upscale neighborhoods where poor people of color are tolerated and allowed a few master class privileges so long as they do not pose a fundamental challenge to the socioeconomic order. Considering quilombos as an early articulation of such coexistence could help students of contemporary Brazil to better understand how and why most poor people of color, who reside in favelas or on the periphery of cities, largely acquiesce to—rather than resist—white supremacy and oligarchic rule.Miki deploys the concept of frontier in lieu of sertão in an effort to critique the trope, common among Brazilian historians and the general public, of the hinterlands as backward, uncivilized, and wild and therefore marginal to nation and modernity. I find this discursive move counterproductive because in the effort to center the interior à la Frederick Jackson Turner, frontier's power- and color-blind conceptual baggage only further obscures the racist underpinnings of the backlands' perceived irrelevance. In my opinion, a more fruitful tack would entail sticking with the emic category of sertão, given that it better foregrounds race (albeit uncritically), and focusing instead on infusing it with the sensibilities of critical race studies.Finally, I appreciated immensely Miki's efforts to demarginalize indigenous peoples, histories, and simulations by successfully demonstrating the relevance of indigeneity to Brazilian ideas of nation, labor, nature, modernity, and citizenship. And yet Miki, as does much Atlantic historiography, at times continues to conceptualize slaves as a black-only population even though she routinely notes indigenous slavery as central to the colonial process of ethnic cleansing. Examples of this slave qua black slippage are most evident in the discussions of quilombos. In one instance, the settler community of Colônia Leopoldina is described as a product of “the enslaved labor of Africans and their descendants” (p. 46). Is the reader to believe that the enslaved indigenous people from this region were kept separate from those of African descent? Or consider one of Miki's central case studies: the quilombola Benedito. He is described as yellowish in color and able to evade arrest due to his deep knowledge of the natural environment—a trait attributed in the book to indigenous people. It is the various historical tidbits such as these that left me questioning Miki's framing of quilombolas as nonindigenous.My few criticisms should not detract from the strengths and immense significance of Miki's excellent scholarship on a region that has been all but ignored by historians. The forbidden lands, like all of Brazil, have been the site of unimaginable carnage, and until this history and its legacies are unpacked and confronted, Brazil will continue to flounder. Therefore anyone who cares about the future of Brazil can only hope that Frontiers of Citizenship will be read widely

Archaeology · Capitalism · Citizenship · Ethnology · Hegemony · Historiography · Indigenous · Modernity · Opposition (politics · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

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