Braz. political sci. rev.2026;20(3):e0005.

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‘Tropicália’ and the Afterlife of Slavery: Toward an Enfleshed Political Theory of Migration

Raissa Wihby Ventura

DOI: 10.1590/1981-3821202600030005

Abstract

This article argues that the killing of Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe at the ‘Tropicália’ kiosk in Rio de Janeiro exposes a constitutive limit in dominant normative theories of migration. Rather than treating the case as an episode of private violence or labor conflict, it reads ‘Tropicália’ as a scene in which border regimes operate beyond territorial admission, through racialized labor, documentation, policing, and everyday vulnerability. In doing so, the article challenges idealized and presentist approaches that evaluate migration primarily through questions of admission, state discretion, distributive duties, or the existence of a right to migrate. Such approaches misidentify the wrong at stake when they detach borders from the afterlife of slavery, colonialism, and Brazil’s nineteenth-century projects of whitening and immigrant selection. The analysis unfolds in three steps. First, it reconstructs the limits of ideal theory in migration ethics and defends a non-ideal, reparative, and enfleshed mode of theorizing. Second, it traces how Brazilian nation-building produced a racialized grammar of desirable and undesirable mobility. Third, it reads the judicial archive of Kabagambe’s murder against the grain, showing how legal and social narratives reproduce the very regimes of disposability they purport to document. The article concludes that an adequate political theory of migration must shift from admission-centered debates toward historically indexed duties of acknowledgement, repair, and institutional transformation.