{"title":"Witnesses to Freedom: Paula's Enslavement, Her Family's Freedom Suit, and the Making of a Counterarchive in the South Atlantic World","authors":"John C. Marquez","doi":"10.1215/00182168-8897477","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n In 1753, a pregnant woman named Paula was kidnapped in Angola, enslaved, and taken to Brazil. Four decades later, in 1794, Paula's children and grandchildren, 15 in total, filed a lawsuit for their family's freedom in Rio de Janeiro claiming that Paula was a free woman in Angola before her enslavement. This article reconstructs Paula and her descendants' multigenerational legal battle and reveals that their struggle for freedom was, in large part, a struggle against archives. I examine a unique aspect of the freedom suit: witness testimony from Paula's former kin and community in Angola, collected across the Atlantic Ocean four decades after Paula's enslavement. I argue that the memory and testimony of Paula's kin and community in Angola formed a powerful counterarchive that not only narrated her freedom in Angola but also challenged the Brazilian colonial archive's reliance on paper evidence of freedom.","PeriodicalId":45400,"journal":{"name":"Americas","volume":"13 1","pages":"231-263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Americas","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-8897477","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
In 1753, a pregnant woman named Paula was kidnapped in Angola, enslaved, and taken to Brazil. Four decades later, in 1794, Paula's children and grandchildren, 15 in total, filed a lawsuit for their family's freedom in Rio de Janeiro claiming that Paula was a free woman in Angola before her enslavement. This article reconstructs Paula and her descendants' multigenerational legal battle and reveals that their struggle for freedom was, in large part, a struggle against archives. I examine a unique aspect of the freedom suit: witness testimony from Paula's former kin and community in Angola, collected across the Atlantic Ocean four decades after Paula's enslavement. I argue that the memory and testimony of Paula's kin and community in Angola formed a powerful counterarchive that not only narrated her freedom in Angola but also challenged the Brazilian colonial archive's reliance on paper evidence of freedom.