Tracking whereabouts

urban geographies of slave runaway in the nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The factuality of any property relationship assumes the knowledge of the whereabouts of the possessed by the possessor, since no one can enjoy the useful domain of something whose location is unknown. This is especially important in the case of ownership of other human beings, as their symbolic capacity facilitates the imagination of alternative social and spatial realities. For the enslaved in 19^th century Brazil, one of the ways to challenge and, ultimately, break with their social condition was to deprive their master of the knowledge of their whereabouts. In the largest cities, this could be achieved not only through long-distance runaways, but also through camouflage in the urban crowd itself, which made it difficult to discern between free, freed and enslaved blacks. In this article, we analysed these intraurban geographies in Rio de Janeiro through the runaways advertised in Jornal do Commercio in the years 1830, 1840 and 1850. Using computerized spatial analysis techniques, we study the locational pattern of advertisers (their residences) and runaways (place of disappearance and last sighting), using urban parishes as a mapping grid. In addition to the importance of the port as the main attraction for runaways, what emerges from this analysis is the centrality of Jornal do Commercio newsroom in the dynamics of socio-spatial production of advertisements. Dependent on human messengers (many of them probably enslaved) and their travels through the city, this “lost-and-found” was a fundamental part of the social control system of slave life.