Amy Chazkel | Columbia University (original) (raw)

Books by Amy Chazkel

Spanning a period of over 450 years, this book traces Rio's history, culture, and politics. It co... more Spanning a period of over 450 years, this book traces Rio's history, culture, and politics. It contains a mix of primary documents—many appearing in English for the first time—that present the "Marvelous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.

This issue of Radical History Review extends the discussion of Haitian history rekindled by the e... more This issue of Radical History Review extends the discussion of Haitian history rekindled by the earthquake of 2010 and highlights the ways that Haiti and Haitians as inextricable from world history.

The lottery called the jogo do bicho, or “animal game,” originated as a raffle at a zoo in Rio de... more The lottery called the jogo do bicho, or “animal game,” originated as a raffle at a zoo in Rio de Janeiro in 1892. During the next decade, it became a cultural phenomenon all over Brazil, where it remains popular today. Laws of Chance chronicles the game’s early history, as booking agents, dealers, and players spread throughout Rio and the lottery was outlawed and driven underground. Analyzing the game’s popularity, its persistence despite bouts of state repression, and its sociocultural meanings, Amy Chazkel unearths a rich history of popular participation in urban public life in the decades after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the establishment of the Brazilian republic in 1889. Contending that the jogo do bicho was a precursor to the massive informal economies that developed later in the twentieth century, she sheds new light on the roots of the informal trade that is central to daily life in urban Latin America. The jogo do bicho operated as a form of unlicensed petty commerce in the vast gray area between the legal and the illegal. Police records show that players and ticket sellers were often arrested but rarely prosecuted. Chazkel argues that the animal game developed in dialogue with the official judicial system. Ticket sellers, corrupt police, and lenient judges worked out a system of everyday justice that would characterize public life in Brazil throughout the twentieth century.

This issue of RHR, the second in a two-part series, probes the limits of the concept of the enclo... more This issue of RHR, the second in a two-part series, probes the limits of the concept of the enclosure of the commons to explore the various forms that the dispossession of communal property has taken in the modern world.

This issue of Radical History Review revisits the classic but perennially relevant question of th... more This issue of Radical History Review revisits the classic but perennially relevant question of the “enclosure of the commons,” the historical process though which commonly-held spaces have been transformed into private domains.

Papers and Articles by Amy Chazkel

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2020

During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selecti... more During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. It also emerged from the actions of people who used the darker hours for work, play, and resistance against oppression, especially members of the city's immense enslaved population and the growing number of free persons of African descent. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. This article explores how the curfew established patterns and means of limiting the basic freedom to move about the city. It was at night when both the necessity and fragility of what jurists in Brazil called the "freedom to come and go" came into view. The daily transition between day and night enacted juridical changes that, although invisible at the national level, fundamentally shaped the social categories that determined people's places in society in ways that historical research has yet to explore.

Os poderes municipais e a cidade: Império e República, Paulo Cruz Terra, Marcelo de Souza Magalhães, e Marta Abreu, orgs. (Mauad), 2019

in Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Global Lynching and Collective Violence (University of Illinois Press... more in Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Global Lynching and Collective Violence (University of Illinois Press, 2017), 68-84.

in Andréa Casa Nova Maia, org., O Muindo do Trabalho nas Páginas das revistas ilustradas (Rio de ... more in Andréa Casa Nova Maia, org., O Muindo do Trabalho nas Páginas das revistas ilustradas (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 7 Letras, 2016).

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2010

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2007

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2004

Spanning a period of over 450 years, The Rio de Janeiro Reader (Duke University Press, 2015) trac... more Spanning a period of over 450 years, The Rio de Janeiro Reader (Duke University Press, 2015) traces the history, culture, and politics of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the voices, images, and experiences of those who have made the city's history. It outlines Rio's transformation from a hardscrabble colonial outpost and strategic port into an economic, cultural, and entertainment capital of the modern world. The volume contains a wealth of primary sources, many of which appear here in English for the first time. A mix of government documents, lyrics, journalism, speeches, ephemera, poems, maps, engravings, photographs, and other sources capture everything from the fantastical impressions of the first European arrivals to the complaints about roving capoeira gangs, and from sobering eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutality to the glitz of Copacabana. The definitive English-language resource on the city, The Rio de Janeiro Reader presents the "Marvelous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.

Advance preview on Scribd.

At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930, the clandestine lottery called the jogo d... more At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930, the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho or ' animal game ', which still exists today, gained enormous popularity in Rio de Janeiro, the city of its origin, and soon in the whole of Brazil. Reconstructing the spread and persecution of the jogo do bicho during its first decades reveals the social process of urbanisation evident in the daily, often informal and quasi-legal, interactions between the state and popular commerce in Latin America. The ambivalent official stance and public sentiment that developed toward this lottery suggest that ' law and order ' concerns in themselves do not explain the criminalisation of vernacular practices.

Revista Mundos do Trabalho (Brasil), Sep 2013

Abstract: The city of Rio de Janeiro was under curfew for a continuous period that lasted for mo... more Abstract:
The city of Rio de Janeiro was under curfew for a continuous period that lasted for more than half of the nineteenth century, for nearly the entire Empire. This article analyzes the implementation of a nighttime curfew in Rio in the context of the social and legal history of the decades to follow. The principal focus is the so-called Toque de Aragão—the edict named after its author, Fernando Teixeira de Aragão, the head of Rio’s police—that imposed severe limitations on the nighttime freedom of movement and association for certain groups of persons, especially those of African descent. The designation of the nighttime as a legal category and, in effect, a separate jurisdiction, was related to the control of workers, and in particular to the changing landscape of forced labor in the most populous and politically significant city in newly independent Brazil.

Resumo:
Durante mais da metade do século XIX, cobrindo boa parte do período imperial, as noites da cidade do Rio de Janeiro estiveram, quase sem interrupção, sob toque de recolher. Este artigo analisa a implementação dessas medidas, no contexto da história social e legal da cidade do período. Seu principal foco será o Edital de 1825, que estabeleceu o chamado “Toque de Aragão”, a norma municipal batizada em homenagem ao Intendente de Polícia do Rio de Janeiro, responsável por ordenar a severa limitação da liberdade de circulação de pessoas durante a noite, bem como impedir ou dificultar a reunião de determinados grupos de moradores daquela cidade, investigando suas causas e efeitos. A designação da noite como uma categoria jurídica e, com efeito, uma jurisdição à parte, estava relacionada ao controle dos trabalhadores e, em particular, à evolução do panorama do trabalho forçado na cidade mais populosa e politicamente significativa do Brasil recém-independente.

Organized by the historian Amy Chazkel, who also provides the foreword, this forum gathers the wo... more Organized by the historian Amy Chazkel, who also provides the foreword, this forum gathers the work of three historians of Latin America who have written extensively on the social history of crime, prompting them to reflect on a ubiquitous but little studied public history institution: the police museum. Alejandra Bronfman, Lila Caimari, and Robert Buffington, specialists in Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico, respectively, guide us through a selection of five police museums: one in Havana that played a crucial role in legal medicine and developing ideas about race during Cuba's Republican period but no longer exists; one in Buenos Aires that was founded as part of the early twentieth-century wave of police reform and modernization; and two in Mexico City and one in Guadalajara that mushroomed in the context of the Mexican police's public image hemorrhage of recent decades. This forum is a critical examination of not only objects on display but also the deeper logic of the categorizing schemes used in each museum. The official history of crime presented to the public, epitomized by police museums, provides a fascinating counterpoint to the contemporary academic history of crime in Latin America, which is remarkably diverse but converges on its use of historical analysis to challenge normative understandings of the law and the illicit. Far from “calling the law into question,” unsurprisingly, police museums naturalize and dehistoricize the criminal law. Yet this forum points toward ways in which further research on police museums can shed new light on how the public encounters the most problematic and controversial manifestations of state power.

"The Rio de Janeiro state archive's collection of entry logs for the city's central detention cen... more "The Rio de Janeiro state archive's collection of entry logs for the city's central detention center, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse into the lives of Rio's—and Brazil's—poor and working classes who otherwise left few written records behind. During the time when the institution maintained the entry logs, police exercised broad power to make arrests. Although relatively few detainees were ever prosecuted or even formally charged, the detention center kept detailed records of detainees' physical appearance, attire, home address, nationality, sex, affiliation, and so on, as well as information about any criminal charges. This article explores the wealth of empirical data that the entry logs provide. It also suggests how scrutinizing this type of document across time shows how record keeping itself changed, in turn affording researchers rare insight into the inner workings of modern Latin American society.

O acervo do Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro possui os livros de matrícula da casa de detenção da cidade do Rio, que cobre o período a partir da metade do século XIX. Estes documentos proporcionam pistas raras sobre as vidas das classes pobres da cidade do Rio de Janeiro e do Brasil, cujos registros são muito poucos. Enquanto esta instituição mantinha estes livros de matrícula, a polícia tinha uma larga noção de criminalidade e em função disto fazia um número acentuado de prisões. Apesar do fato da maioria dos detentos não ter um processo formal instaurado, a casa de detenção mantinha registros de detentos nos quais eram destacados, entre outros, a aparência física, a vestimenta, o endereço residencial, a nacionalidade, o sexo, a filiação, assim como informações sobre os delitos alegados. Este artigo analisa a riqueza de dados empíricos dos livros de matrícula desta instituição. Também sugere como devemos perscrutar este tipo de documento através do tempo para perceber como a forma de registro mudou e como esta mudança pode auxiliar o pesquisador a construir conhecimento sobre o funcionamento da sociedade moderna latino-americana."

The cartoonist and filmmaker Nina Paley became a vociferous opponent of proprietary control of cr... more The cartoonist and filmmaker Nina Paley became a vociferous opponent of proprietary control of creative work under U.S. copyright law following her experiences in making her award-winning Sita Sings the Blues (2009), an animated feature film based largely on the ancient Indian epic story of the Ramayana set to music from the 1920s, whose rights are owned by media corporations. Paley released her film, and all subsequent work, under a Creative Commons license, which not only made it freely available to anyone who wished to view, share, and add to her creative work but also legally protected her work as part of the cultural commons in perpetuity. In this interview with Amy Chazkel, Paley explains her travails as she tried to "free" her work, the artistic and creative benefit of doing so, and the rationale behind her political conviction. She also probes the connections between the enclosure of the cultural and the material commons.

This article reconstructs the social ecology of the Brazilian capital city's principal Detention ... more This article reconstructs the social ecology of the Brazilian capital city's principal Detention Center (Casa de Detenção) at the beginning of the country's First Republic (1889–1930). Most of the persons in Rio's city jail at this time were only detained for a relatively brief period and without any formal charges. This detention center's manuscript entry logs, annual ministerial reports, administrative correspondence, and published prison diaries and journalistic accounts reveal this institution as a living theater that dramatizes the gap between legal code and real-life juridical practice more powerfully than perhaps any other institution in modern, urban Brazil. The criminal justice system provided the primary interface between the state and nonelite members of Rio society. During their time in the Casa de Detenção before being acquitted, transferred to a different penal facility, or deported, an astonishingly heterogeneous group of detainees interacted with each other and with agents of the state. Ultimately, I argue, detainees' experiences in the city jail provided them with a civic education of sorts; in this setting, inmates—and indirectly their families and associates outside the jail—learned not only how to navigate the criminal justice system but also, more generally, the informal and formal rules that governed their society. Going beyond the assumption that the incarcerated were socially "dead," this article seeks to contribute an understanding of the social ripple effects of informal judicial and policing procedures in urbanizing, post-abolition Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2020

Os poderes municipais e a cidade: Império e República, Paulo Cruz Terra, Marcelo de Souza Magalhães, e Marta Abreu, orgs. (Mauad), 2019

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2010

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2007

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2004

Advance preview on Scribd.

Revista Mundos do Trabalho (Brasil), Sep 2013

At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the jogo ... more At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho or ‘animal game’, which still exists today, gained enormous popularity in Rio de Janeiro, the city of its origin, and soon in the whole of Brazil. Reconstructing the spread and persecution of the jogo do bicho during its first decades reveals the social process of urbanisation evident in the daily, often informal and quasi-legal, interactions between the state and popular commerce in Latin America. The ambivalent official stance and public sentiment that developed toward this lottery suggest that ‘law and order’ concerns in themselves do not explain the criminalisation of vernacular practices.

James N. Green est un historien qui a toujours eu des liens etroits avec le Bresil, comme cherche... more James N. Green est un historien qui a toujours eu des liens etroits avec le Bresil, comme chercheur, mais aussi anterieurement comme militant des droits de l’homme. En 1998, durant un colloque, il dut faire face a une desagreable question. Pourquoi, lui demanda-t-on, les universitaires etats-uniens ont si peu fait pour denoncer les atrocites du regime militaire bresilien entre les annees 1960 et le debut des annees 1980 ? De fait, le gouvernement des Etats-Unis a soutenu le regime militaire e...

Luso-Brazilian Review, 2016

Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, Sep 23, 2014

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Brazil produced a generation of literary and journali... more Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Brazil produced a generation of literary and journalistic writers known as cronistas who were animated by both a curious desire to know their city and a healthy humility in the face of its impenetrable mystery. In a lighthearted and somewhat sardonic style, Orestes Barbosa's above passage reveals the thoughts of someone whose vocation is to know the city, and yet who pronounces it unknowable. Lame human attempts to place markers on the inscrutable urban terrain are only absorbed again into the chaos, leaving readers to ponder the irony and contradictions that emanate from the eternal enigma of the city. Barbosa's quotation is typical of its time and genre, the cronica, a hybrid form of expression halfway between y and journalism. In their approach to writing about the city, the authors of these cronicas belong equally to the cults of mystery, fact-finding, and reporting. For the historian of urban Brazil, these texts present both a gold mine of insights into the daily life of the past and a minefield of authorial biases, distortions, and idiosyncrasies.

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, Nov 1, 2009

Duke University Press eBooks, Oct 6, 2020

The American Historical Review, Dec 1, 2016

View related articles View Crossmark data citizens when governmentsirrespective of their ideologi... more View related articles View Crossmark data citizens when governmentsirrespective of their ideological inclinationput partisan interests before the needs of the population. Even so, researchers focused on crime and violence in the Americas will need to contemplate how to conduct fieldwork in hazardous circumstances, how to access social groups with whom they share no racial, class, or gender attributes, and how to enter institutional settingssuch as prisonsthat have access restrictions.

Luso-Brazilian Review, Dec 1, 2016

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, Nov 1, 2012

University of Illinois Press eBooks, Sep 15, 2017

In this chapter, Frank Jacob carefully examines another significant manifestation of collective v... more In this chapter, Frank Jacob carefully examines another significant manifestation of collective violence in Asian history: the mass atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers against Chinese in the Rape of Nanking in 1937 and 1938. First analyzing at length the contentious historiography and historical evidence surrounding this pivotal episode of collective violence performed by agents of the Japanese state, Jacob then closely examines the violence perpetrated at Nanking from a theoretical perspective, arguing that it displayed both dynamics of state-sponsored macro-violence such as warfare and genocide as well as some qualities of extralegal micro-violence, such as lynching.

The ever-increasing availability of primary sources on the Internet, not to mention classics of t... more The ever-increasing availability of primary sources on the Internet, not to mention classics of the scholarly literature and other secondary sources, makes everyone suspect that printed readers and anthologies have become as anachronistic as the typewriter. If so, however, this particular cartographic reader must be the exception that proves the rule. Matthew H. Edney, current editor in chief of the multivolume History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press, 1987-forthcoming), provides an engaging foreword that explains how maps not only record historical locations, distributions, and movements but are intimately involved in the processes through which those spatial aspects of history emerge. Historians have increasingly appreciated that aspect of cartographic documents and have begun to integrate their analyses into historiographies largely based on textual documents. The pages that follow Edney's foreword collect together approximately a hundred historical maps, some well known and available on the Internet as high-resolution scans but many not. The volume reproduces them in full color on coated paper at scales large enough to read all but the smallest text. It treats Latin America and the Caribbean from precolonial times through the twentieth century. It includes maps as diverse as a Maya wall mural, a map that accompanied a board game, various city plans, an oil company road map, and many other types. They cover the spectrum of scales from the global and hemispheric to nations and individual properties. Some 50 scholars provide brief interpretive essays, each about four pages long and focused on the analysis of one or several related maps. The editors have grouped the essays into three sections: the colonial period, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. Each section contains several thematic subsections with three to five essays that address topics relevant to each period, for example, "Imagining a New World" during colonial times, "Bounding the State" during the nineteenth century, and "Revolution and Resistance" during the twentieth century. The editors close the volume with an appendix of additional resources: a listing of journals, Internet sites, and documentary films focused on historical cartography; and a series of brief historiographical essays on topics such as colonial surveying.

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, Aug 1, 2001

Global Lynching and Collective Violence

This panel is part of the Uptown People’s Assembly: Facing the Raging Pandemic host by the Wallac... more This panel is part of the Uptown People’s Assembly: Facing the Raging Pandemic host by the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. For twelve running hours, this assembly brings together artists working in all disciplines, arts professionals, and scholars to moderate a durational event of art, testimony and conversation with a focus on our current compounding crises: the coronavirus and the civil unrest decrying the racist killings of Black people by police officers. Both community members and the general public are invited to speak and participate in this event. More information and registration HERE. Speaking of Worlds Without Police, an improptu panel of Care for the Polis, will give an overview of the series and of the arguments it has so far offered on the promises and injustices of health and so-called public systems, and the contentious but also possibly emancipatory power of the notion of care. Our presentation will lay out one the main premise of the series in its curre...

Brésil(s), 2012

Law and History Review, 2020

This brief article introduces the responses to Rebecca J. Scott's “Discerning a Dignitary Off... more This brief article introduces the responses to Rebecca J. Scott's “Discerning a Dignitary Offense.”

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2007

At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the j... more At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho or ‘animal game’, which still exists today, gained enormous popularity in Rio de Janeiro, the city of its origin, and soon in the whole of Brazil. Reconstructing the spread and persecution of the jogo do bicho during its first decades reveals the social process of urbanisation evident in the daily, often informal and quasi-legal, interactions between the state and popular commerce in Latin America. The ambivalent official stance and public sentiment that developed toward this lottery suggest that ‘law and order’ concerns in themselves do not explain the criminalisation of vernacular practices.

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2009

… de America Latina y el Caribe: …, 2001