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This paper examines a controversial affair during Rio de Janeiro's 2008 Carnival parade, involving a Holocaust float banned by Jewish community representatives. The episode serves as a case study for discussing Brazil's main cultural strategies for dealing with its diverse social formation. The paper evaluates the impact of such particular modes of sociability on the decision to ban the float, while pondering over the challenges of Brazilian-Jewish cultural interactions in a global era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to discuss the process of delegitimisation of Brazilian slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Several reasons contributed to delegitimise the slave regime in Brazil, such as the end of the Atlantic slave trade, the rise of the average price of a slave and the growing number of manumissions. A large number of these manumissions were obtained through freedom suits, in which slaves brought lawsuits against their masters arguing in the courts that they had the right to be freed. The paper focuses specifically on the freedom suits initiated in the late 1860s on the border of Brazil with Uruguay. In these lawsuits, slaves argued that, because they had crossed the border and stepped on free Uruguayan soil, they had the right to be freed once they returned to Brazil. Lawyers based their petitions on an 1831 law that prohibited the entrance of slaves into Brazilian territory. It also demonstrates that the free soil concept, after being considered juridically legitimate by the courts, was used by abolitionist lawyers throughout the country in the 1870s, contributing to the political movement that ended the slave regime in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation. These markers are read as statements about belonging on the part of formerly enslaved women and their female descendants in a racially based slave society that was also formally and informally patriarchal in structure and Catholic in culture. The historical sources are used to provide a measure of the momentum of mobility engendered by manumission and passed down through the generations of freed and free black women, and reveal the limitations of mobility made possible either economically through occupation or socially through marriage. Analysed collectively, the wills and testaments of these women provide insights into the ways in which race and gender shaped the contours and confines of freedom in Salvador in particular and Brazilian slave society in general and reveal how perceptions and experiences of the limitations of integration shaped their versions of creolisation as well as their visions of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]