As cores do suicídio: a morte na sociedade escravocrata do Rio de Janeiro (1830 – 1850)

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze black suicide in Rio de Janeiro's slave society between 1830 and 1850 from the perspective of the banality of death, from the theoretical framework related to the politics of death (necropolitical and biopolitical).The methodology chosen would be comparative history, where we will analyze the mechanisms that governed suicide between black individuals (slaves and freedmen born in Brazil) and Africans (foreign blacks) as opposed to whites in the city of Rio de Janeiro between 1830 and 1850. We will use as sources the court police archives and journals of the Rio de Janeiro Newspaper. Suicide is a phenomenon that occurs in all societies. In this sense, it is a recurring and relevant subject in our day. Historically, in the nineteenth century, the society of Rio, amid the social organization marked by slavery, lived with constant cases of suicides. The Court was a space where death policy acted as a vector for the black, African and white population, even as a product of an aristocratic society. The problem that underlies the research is: Does suicide have a color in a slave aristocratic society? That is, is there a predominance of suicides over certain groups of people?