A Miscarriage of Justice examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities-their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers-became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination. By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives, A Miscarriage of Justice provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state-and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive rights and women's health in Brazil today.

A Miscarriage of Justice examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities-their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers-became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination. By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives, A Miscarriage of Justice provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state-and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive rights and women's health in Brazil today.

Trajectories of Empire extends from the beginning of the Iberian expansion of the mid-fifteenth century, through colonialism and slavery, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin American republics. Its point of departure is the question of empire and its aftermath, as reflected in the lives of contemporary Latin Americans of African descent, and of their ancestors caught up in the historical process of Iberian colonial expansion, colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade. The book's chapters explore what it's like to be Black today in the so-called racial democracies of Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba; the role of medical science in the objectification and nullification of Black female personhood during slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century; the deployment of visual culture to support insurgency for a largely illiterate slave body again in the nineteenth century in Cuba; aspects of discourse that promoted the colonial project as evangelization, or alternately offered resistance to its racialized culture of dominance in the seventeenth century; and the experiences of the first generations of forced African migrants into Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the discursive template was created around their social roles as enslaved or formerly enslaved people. Trajectories of Empire's contributors come from the fields of literary criticism, visual culture, history, anthropology, popular culture (rap), and cultural studies. As the product of an interdisciplinary collective, this book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in Iberian or Hispanic Studies, Africana Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Transatlantic Studies, as well as the general public.

Trajectories of Empire extends from the beginning of the Iberian expansion of the mid-fifteenth century, through colonialism and slavery, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin American republics. Its point of departure is the question of empire and its aftermath, as reflected in the lives of contemporary Latin Americans of African descent, and of their ancestors caught up in the historical process of Iberian colonial expansion, colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade. The book's chapters explore what it's like to be Black today in the so-called racial democracies of Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba; the role of medical science in the objectification and nullification of Black female personhood during slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century; the deployment of visual culture to support insurgency for a largely illiterate slave body again in the nineteenth century in Cuba; aspects of discourse that promoted the colonial project as evangelization, or alternately offered resistance to its racialized culture of dominance in the seventeenth century; and the experiences of the first generations of forced African migrants into Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the discursive template was created around their social roles as enslaved or formerly enslaved people. Trajectories of Empire's contributors come from the fields of literary criticism, visual culture, history, anthropology, popular culture (rap), and cultural studies. As the product of an interdisciplinary collective, this book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in Iberian or Hispanic Studies, Africana Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Transatlantic Studies, as well as the general public.