Freedom's Horizon: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Isadora Moura Mota

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Isadora Moura Mota about her recent book, "Freedom's Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). In shifting the periodization of the history of abolition in Brazil from the 1870s and 1880s to the 1840s and 1860s, Mota recenters the intellectual contributions of the enslaved in this transnational story. This conversation, as a result, touches upon some of the critical implications of this recentering—or, taking these enslaved actors seriously as thinkers in their own right—on the history of political thought and social movements in Brazil and writ large.