The Last Slave Ship: Searching for African Counterhistories from Boston to the Brazilian Amazon

SAVE THE DATE! Join us for a talk with Professor Yuko Miki sponsored by Latin American and Caribbean Studies!

By tracing the journey of the last slave ship to Brazil from Boston to the Congo and the Amazon, this talk explores the possibilities of narrating African counterhistories from within and beyond the archives of antislavery in a story spanning 170 years. 

How do we narrate the stories of people who are both liberated and deceased? This was the question that spurred my journey following the trail of the Mary E. Smith, the last slave ship to Brazil. In 1855 the vessel departed from Boston Harbor and headed for the Congo, where it loaded its hold with nearly 500 women, men, and children. After a horrific Middle Passage, the ship was captured off the Brazilian coast in 1856 and celebrated as evidence of Brazil's commitment to slave trade suppression. The captives were declared "Liberated" from slavery. However, nearly two-thirds of them died in the ensuing months and survivors were forced into servile labor, with some taken to the Amazon. In the official record, the Africans are barely a footnote in the broader history of antislavery. 

Is it possible to narrate the lives of these women, men, and children from these archives? In this talk I explore the challenges and possibilities of writing the Africans' counterhistories as a way to engage in what civil rights leader Brian Stevenson has called a "narrative struggle." The search takes me beyond the paper archives into the world of Kongo and Amazonian cosmologies and to the Quilombo of Serpa in the Brazilian Amazon, where a meeting with the Mary E. Smith Africans' descendants transforms my understanding of historical knowledge and inheritance. 

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. Her book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge) received awards and honors across multiple fields, including the Wesley-Logan Prize for African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Warren Dean Memorial Prize for Brazilian History from the Conference on Latin American History. The Portuguese-language edition is now available from Brazil's Companhia das Letras. She is currently completing her new book, Kalunga: The Story of the Last Slave Ship to Brazil (working title), under contract with One Signal / Simon & Schuster. She has also authored works in English and Portuguese that have appeared in edited volumes and journals including the Americas; Slavery & Abolition; and Social Text. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, among others. She received her B.A. from Brown University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. A native of Tokyo, she lives in Brooklyn. 

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