History, Informal Urbanism, and Race: The View from Brazil’s Postabolition Period

As historians begin to acknowledge the importance of informal urbanism in the creation of the world’s cities, north and south, a challenge presents itself. How do we not only document that informality has a history, but also begin to understand how informality is a part of history, integral to larger questions about things like state formation, the role of law, welfare, inequality, and the environment? My presentation will take up that challenge, focusing attention on the intersection of race and informal governance in Brazil in the half century after abolition. In that context, Brazilian informality can be usefully understood not as a 20^th century offshoot of development but rather as an afterlife of slavery that helped to perpetuate Brazilian racial inequality even as it created spaces of Black autonomy and resistance.