AFRICAN VOICES FROM THE CONGO COAST: LANGUAGES AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTIFICATION IN THE SLAVE SHIP JOVEM MARIA (1850)

Between 1845 and 1850, the Congo coast became the most important source of slaves for the coffee growing areas in the Brazilian Empire. This essay develops a new methodology to understand the making of the ‘nations’ of 290 Africans found on the slave ship Jovem Maria, which boarded slaves in the Con...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of African history 2019-07, Vol.60 (2), p.167-189
Main Author: DE ALMEIDA, MARCOS ABREU LEITÃO
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
African history
African languages
Archives & records
Bantu languages
Coffee
Diaspora
Ethnolinguistic groups
Ethnolinguistics
Historians
Identification
Language history
Lingua francas
Linguistics
Names
Negotiation
Politics
Re-Interpreting Affiliations in 19th Century Records
Rivers
Slavery
Social history
Speaking
Vocabulary
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Between 1845 and 1850, the Congo coast became the most important source of slaves for the coffee growing areas in the Brazilian Empire. This essay develops a new methodology to understand the making of the ‘nations’ of 290 Africans found on the slave ship Jovem Maria, which boarded slaves in the Congo river and was captured by the Brazilian Navy near Rio de Janeiro in 1850. A close reading of such ‘nations’ reveals a complex overlapping between languages and forms of identification that alters the historian's use of concepts such as ‘ethnolinguistic group’ and ‘Bantu-based lingua franca’ in the Atlantic world. Building on recent developments in Central African linguistics, the article develops a social history of African languages in the Atlantic that foregrounds how recaptives negotiated commonalities and boundaries in the diaspora by drawing on a political vocabulary indigenous to their nineteenth-century homes in Central Africa.
ISSN:0021-8537
1469-5138
DOI:10.1017/S0021853719000422