This chapter seeks to illuminate the development of racialized subjectivities as an historical problem in nineteenth-century Brazil. It analyzes the letters and writings of the Afro-descendant engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças (1838–1898), with special attention to the role of racial silence in Rebouças’ personal diary and in the edited papers of his father, lawyer and statesman Antônio Pereira Rebouças (1798–1880). The self-narratives André Rebouças left to posterity are powerful testimony to the significance of transnational politics for universalist Black intellectuals in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In exploring them, this chapter illuminates the racialized subjectivization engendered by the stigma of slavery and portrays the ways in which its politicization was shaped by a collective transnational experience.