Robin Lynn Lecture

This is an endowed lecture focused on urban studies and urban history.

2023-2024: Brodwyn Fischer

April 11, 2024

"Slavery’s Survivals: Intimacy, Informality, and Inequality in a Brazilian City"

What were slavery’s urban legacies in the Americas’ largest and most enduring slave society? This talk is built from the archival scraps of everyday lives in Recife, an iconic northeastern city that helped give birth to Brazil’s myth of racial democracy. It explores how the intimate but radically unequal relational networks that sustained urban slavery persisted after abolition, shaping the pursuit of full freedom and structuring urban racial and spatial injustice to the present day.

Brodwyn Fischer is a professor of Brazilian and Latin American history at the University of Chicago. Her work explores the roots of urban social and racial inequality, focusing especially on the ways that law intersects with informality to create and constrict possibilities for just and free cities.