A Spatial History of the Free Africans of the Slave Ship Cezar, 1838-1865

FAIN: FT-59742-12

Daryle Williams
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

The project is a historical study of the places of enslavement, emancipation, and liberty traversed by two hundred and sixty West-Central Africans illegally transported from Angola to Rio de Janeiro in 1838 aboard the Brazilian-flag slave ship Cezar. In partnership with the Terrain of History, a collaborative research team housed under Stanford University's Spatial History Project, the research will cross-reference six nominal lists of these Africans with geospatial databases of nineteenth-century Rio. The two end-products of the funded research are: a series of dynamic, online visualizations of spatial patterns of movement, residence, place of work, and social networks for the Africans of the Cezar and an article, suitable for publication in an academic journal, that brings the experience of the "Free Africans" (emancipados) to the historical debate concerning questions of space in the constitution of the freed(wo)man's life and liberty in an American slave society.