This paper analyzes, through the framework of Materialist Discourse Analysis, the functioning of legal discourse in Brazilian nineteenth-century laws, focusing on the Feijó Law (1831) and the Land Law (1850). We investigate how the signifiers “freed man” (homem liberto) and “free colonist” (colono livre) produce distinct meanings of freedom and subjection, supported by the racial tensions that emerge within the functioning of law during the transition to capitalist modes of production. In what we understand as an intermediary legal form, given the historical, economic, and social discursive context, the law produces demarcations sustained, in the linearity of its formulations, by meanings derived from processes of racialization. It was possible to understand how these processes categorize subjects through antagonistic significations of “free” and “freed”: while the colonist can only be the one who is free to sell his labor power, the freed man has his freedom defined by the non-subjection to slave labor; however, these relations are upheld by racial hierarchies that differentiate white and Black subjects through the discourses that construct them.
