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"The
Broken Paths of Freedom: Free Africans in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Slave
Society" is a historical study of the geographies of enslavement,
emancipation, and liberty traversed by Free Africans [Portuguese: africanos livres; also known as emancipados and "Liberated Africans"],
a fascinating subgroup of the roughly three-quarter million enslaved Africans
illicitly trafficked to the Brazilian
empire between 1821 and 1856. Drawing from nominal registries of approximately
eleven thousand Liberated Africans rescued from about seventy condemned slave
vessels, the project puts space at the center of the life histories of a select
class of men, women, and children clandestinely spirited from West-,
West-Central, and Southeastern Africa after international treaty, colonial law,
and national legislation had circumscribed and then banned outright the
transatlantic slave trade to Brazil.
The
project's blend of archival research and online visualizations of the life
trajectories of the Free Africans' individual and collective movements through
the spaces, experiences, and laws of Luso-Atlantic slavery, from illegal
enslavement between the 1830s and the 1850s to the extension of "full
freedom" to all Free Africans in Brazil by 1864-65, brings the insights
and methods of the "spatial turn" to the analysis and understanding
of the socio-demographic complexities of place in nineteenth-century slavery
and emancipation. Together, these traditional and novel methods of historical
analysis also situate Africans as central protagonists in the geographies of
freedom in Brazil, the largest and most enduring slave society of the Americas.
In its particular attention to the experiences of space for the Free Africans
of Brazil, "The Broken Paths of Freedom" also draws scholarly and
popular attention to the multiple places of liberty and anti-slavery—Free
States, free soil, free wombs, safe houses, and maroon communities, among
others—that existed in constant tension with chattel slavery in Atlantic slave
societies.
A 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and in-kind costshares from the Center for Textual and Spatial Analysis funded the start-up data standardization. The pilot visualization of that data examines the spatial history of the Africans rescued from the Cezar, a Brazilian-flag slave ship seized off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in April 1838. Pilot Search and Visualization Tool
To learn more about the history of the Free Africans, see: The Free Africans of Brazil: Historical Background
