Narrating Freedom in the Archives of Illegal Slavery

This paper delves into the strange, contradictory archives of the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade that flourished between Angola, the Bight of Benin, and Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century. It interweaves the documentary trails of a notorious slave ship, the Mary E. Smith, its multinational owners, and two West African men in Rio de Janeiro suspected of having been on the ship, to consider what Ann Laura Stoler has called the “archival grain” of illegal slavery. On one hand, the particular ways in which the Brazilian state and its British counterparts crafted these archives sheds light on the narratives of freedom that they produced that normalized the horrific suffering and deaths of the anonymous Africans it “rescued.” This cautions us against replicating them in our own desire for satisfying stories, such as the “rise and destruction” of slavery. At the same time, the paper examines the counterarchives of the slave traffickers and of the illegally enslaved themselves to consider the ways in which they trouble predominant narratives of the Age of Emancipation. In particular, it explores how scholars may contend with the deception that was integral to the stories told by the enslaved, their traffickers, and those tasked with the trade’s suppression.

The paper also engages recent scholarship on “the archive” of slavery. Dizzyingly multinational and multilingual, the nature of illegal slavery is reflected in the plurality of its archives. It proposes that scholars must work across these multiple archives even as we recognize that the lives of the enslaved remain fragmentary. Illegal slavery’s archives force us to look beyond commodification and imagine stories of freedom that attend to the suffering and deaths of the enslaved.