ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general overview of freedom suits and their examination in the literature, as well as a short summary of the legal foundations in Brazil upon which freed and enslaved women and men based their court actions. The analysis of freedom suits has been the subject of historiography since the second half of the twentieth century, constituting a major contribution to research on enslavement in imperial Brazil. In many cases, court proceedings have been subject to fact-based readings, meaning that what was said in the dispute was believed to be true or false—rather than scholars examining the reason why and the way in which something was said. By utilizing the narratological perspective from the factual and legal narrative fields, this chapter underlines that (formerly) enslaved women and men consciously chose or at least influenced the story that was told in court.
