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.
This dissertation aims the sociolinguistic dimension of the enslaved Africans' experience brought to Brazilian Empire by the illegal slave trade, that Joaquim Nabuco called the "Trilogy of hell," staged in "Africa", "the ocean" and "plantations" in southeastern Brazil. My goal was to investigate how Africans' linguistic repertoire helped to build the South Atlantic "strophes and prosodies" and address the issue of communication in each stage of the illegal slave trade to seek understand how the formation of new languages and the subsequent cultural exchanges were mobilized by enslaved Africans in daily struggle against massive illegal enslavement in the Brazilian Empire between 1831 and c.1850. Given the importance of the Atlantic routes that connected southeastern Brazil to Congo region and Angola, this research has focused its attention on Central Africans and their language skills, that is, how they learned and handled Portuguese language, negotiated speech communities from their mother tongues and exchange its cultural baggage. Thus, it becomes possible understand how the "language question" was linked with economic and power relations during Brazilian contraband and illegal enslavement amidst the process of State building in Brazilian Empire.
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