Professor Yuko Miki will share sections of her upcoming book, Kalunga (working title), which "traces the voyage of the Mary E. Smith, the last slave ship to Brazil. This narrative history follows the ship from Boston to the Congo, its capture off the Brazilian coast in 1856, and the lives of the survivors and their descendants in the Amazon today.” Professor Miki asks, "How do we narrate the stories of people who are both liberated and deceased?" when considering the africanos livres, enslaved Africans who were supposedly rescued and freed but had in fact died during the Middle Passage or were forced into labor barely distinguishable from slavery.
Yuko Miki, a historian of slavery in Brazil and the Atlantic World, is Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Latinx Studies at Fordham University.
Zoom registration: here
Event organized by the Brazil Studies Working Group.