Senses of legitimacy in tension in the land law of 1850: gestures of interpretation about the land possesion statute in Brazil

Abstract

This paper, grounded in materialist discourse analysis, presents a discursive examination of the tension between the meanings of possession and legitimacy in Imperial Law No. 601/1850, known as the Land Law of 1850 – an important piece of imperial legislation enacted just fourteen days after the official end of the transatlantic slave trade. The law regulated the purchase and sale of land, revalidated sesmarias, legitimized peaceful and uncontested possession, and subsidized a colonization policy that primarily benefited German and Italian immigrants in 19th-century Brazil. Article 1 of the Land Law established purchase and sale as the only legal means of land acquisition, thereby excluding possession as a legitimate form of access from that point onward. However, Article 5 addresses the regularization of possessions acquired prior to the law’s enactment, allowing them to be legally recognized as property upon demarcation and confirmation of the absence of legal disputes. From this perspective, the research raises questions about the regularities of memory effects surrounding land, which enable the discourse analyst to examine the opacity in the interpretative relationship between the legal text and its reader – particularly regarding how legitimacy operates as a racial and class-based cut within the broader political apparatus.