The Coloniality of Justice: Naturalized Divisions During Pre-Trial Hearings in Brazil (original) (raw)
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This paper exposes how colonial ways of knowing and being shape judicial behaviour in Brazil, where pre-trial detention is excessively used against racialised groups. I argue that judges continue to conceptualise and operationalise justice according to colonial logics and thus reveal the coloniality of justice. Drawing on decolonial theory from across South America and from interviews and court observations in Rio de Janeiro, I reveal how judges understand themselves as heroic crime fighters, acting beyond the law in a modern moral crusade. I examine how violence remains a central component of justice and consider how judges deal with the contradiction of neutrality and aggression. I argue that judges, by endorsing or tolerating violence, become agents of coloniality.
Latin American Research Review, 2004
Conceived as a contribution to debates about the role of state institutions in perpetuating racial inequality in modern Brazil, this article explores the relative importance ofsocial and racial characteristics in determining defendants' treatment in Rio de Janeiro's criminal courts between 1930 and 1964. Focusing on rarely noted aspects ofdefendants' class and citizenship status, and emphasizing the importance ofjudicial procedure, it argues that social discrimination was open in Rio de Janeiro's courts, but that race alone was a relatively poor predictor ofdefendants' fates. At the same time, it suggests that racial and social characteristics ought not to be seen as separate and competing categories, both because "social" language had important racial meanings and because "social" discrimination had significant racial implications. Institutionalized social prejudice may thus go far in explaining the stubborn persistence of racial inequity in an age 'lvhen "racial democracy" became a national hope and mantra. Brazilian race relations have intrigued, entranced, and impassioned both nationalist intellectuals and foreign observers for more than half a century. Few subjects are more central to Brazil's national identity, and few have undergone such radical paradigmatic shifts. In the early 1930s, with the publication of Gilberto Freyre's masterful and synthetic (if not entirely original) vision of Brazilian culture, the belief that Brazil had forged from miscegenation and tolerance a society uniquely free of racial prejudice began to take root in both national discourse and international fantasy, gradually replacing the pessimistic "scientific racism" that *1 wish to thank members of the University of Chicago Latin American History workshop (especially Dain Borges and Claudio Lomnitz), participants in the Five-College Social History workshop, and the anonymous LARR referees for their valuable critiques of earlier versions of this article. 1am grateful also to the Fulbright Comission, Harvard University, and the Social Science Research Council for support provided over various years of research. Thanks, too, to Jonathan Brown, Peter Ward, and all of the members of the LARR editorial team for their kindness throughout. Finally, my gratitude to Emilio Kouri, for his insightful readings, and for his loving support.
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