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No description available.

African children in the Atlantic slave trade shared the same desire for freedom as their adult counterparts. They demonstrated agency by using their non-threatening appearance, curiosity, and adaptability to escape captivity or alleviate their predicaments. Previous studies on African children in the slave trade are centered on the circumstances that African children were subjected to rather than the actions they took to navigate those spaces. These works primarily relied on European sources to understand the experience of the enslaved youth in the eighteenth century. I use a combination of slave narratives, slave ship records, and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus theory to understand the enslaved youth's adaptability, intentions, and actions. This study highlights African children's agency and historical contributions in the eighteenth century by studying how they responded to their captivity in the Atlantic slave trade.

PhD (English) / Department of English / See the attached abstract below

The Ais were a Native American group who lived along the Atlantic shoreline of Florida south of Cape Canaveral. This coastal population’s position adjacent to a major shipping route afforded them numerous encounters with the Atlantic world that linked Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Through their exploitation of the goods and peoples from the European shipwrecks thrown ashore, coupled with their careful manipulation of other Atlantic contacts, the Ais polity established an influential domain in central east Florida during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pre-contact peoples of Florida’s east coast, including the ancestors of the Ais, practiced a maritime adaptation concentrated on the exploitation of their bountiful riverine, estuarine, and marine environments. The Ais then modified their maritime skills to cope with the opportunities and challenges that accompanied European contact. Using their existing aquatic abilities, they ably salvaged goods and castaways from the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch vessels dashed on the rocks and reefs of Florida’s coast. The Ais’ strategic redistribution of these materials and peoples to other Florida Native Americans, the Spaniards of St. Augustine, and other passing Europeans gained them greater influence. This process, which I call indigenous wrecking, enabled the Ais to expand their domain on the peninsula. Coastal Florida Native Americans’ maritime abilities also attracted the attention of Europeans. In the late seventeenth century, English buccaneers and salvagers raided Florida’s east coast to capture indigenous divers, whom they sent to work the wreck of a sunken Spanish treasure ship located in the Bahamas. The English subsequently sold the surviving Native American captives to other Caribbean slave markets. Despite population losses to such raids, the Ais and other peoples of the east coast thrived on Atlantic exchange and used their existing maritime adaptation to resist colonial intrusions until the start of the eighteenth century. This dissertation thus offers a narrative about Native Americans and the Atlantic that is unlike most Southeastern Indian stories. The Ais used their maritime adaptation and the process of indigenous wrecking to engage and exploit the arriving Atlantic world. In the contact era, the Ais truly became Atlantic Ais.

Exercitando um escopo de análise histórico e eclético, a presente dissertação versará sobre o funcionamento de um sistema administrativo misto, arquitetado no formato de nodos interconectados, ou apenas rede, em prol da manutenção de um espaço jurisdicional ultramarino. Nessa empreitada, seremos guiados por duas traves-mestras: a primeira é o interesse nos fenômenos advindos dos contatos intersociais, a segunda é a análise perscrutada da documentação inserida nas Fontes para a história de Angola do século XVII, organizadas por Beatrix Heintze. Problematizando algumas das situações coetâneas pelas quais passavam a expansão portuguesa na África Centro-Ocidental, bem como nos debruçando sobre algumas das indagações levantadas por uma historiografia recente, defenderemos que havia uma série de movimentos ambivalentes e ambíguos no que tangia ao governo do domínio ultramarino da Angola portuguesa. Sucintamente, chamaremos atenção para a importância dos procedimentos e resoluções políticoadministrativas adotados naquele domínio, analisando as maneiras de arregimentação e condução de uma máquina de guerra portuguesa, destacando a importância da participação política de atores e sujeitos centro-africanos nos rumos políticos das chamadas conquistas e abordando as relações institucionais e econômicas entre Luanda e os entrepostos portugueses instalados no interior. Por excelência, as hierarquias internas e os contatos sociais e políticos luso-africanos foram gestados em um ambiente conflituoso, entrecortado por tensões sociais, atritos institucionais e embates políticos. Em ultima instância, concluiremos que ocorriam justaposições e aglutinações entre as formas de dominação e intermediação que faziam parte do funcionamento político e institucional da Angola portuguesa, contanto que duas precondições fossem atendidas: o engrandecimento da exploração economia através do tráfico transatlântico e a penetração institucional e política do continente. / Considering an eclectic and historical scope of analysis, this dissertation will argue about the execution of a mixed administrative system, based on institutional nodes interconnected in a form of network system, operated on the behalf of an overseas jurisdictional space. Our efforts will be engaged with two mainstreams: the first is our interest in the phenomena related with some inter-social contacts, the second is the analytical research of the Fontes para a história de Angola do século XVIIs documentation, organized by Beatrix Heintze. Casting some questions related to the different situations concerned with the Portuguese Expansion in the West Central Africa, as well as reflecting some inquiries posed by the recent historiography, here we stand for a settle of ambivalent and ambiguous series of movements emerged from the Portuguese Angolas overseas domain, calling up for the importance of some political and institutional forms of proceedings. They were all managed in order to resolve some issues related with the Portuguese Angola, paying attention to the recruitment and mobilizations of the Portuguese war machine, elucidating how the local political actors interacted with the conquistas and how was carried out the institutional and economical relations between Luanda and the interior entrepôts. All the internal hierarchies and luso-african contacts was settled down in a conflictive environment, crossed through social tensions, institutional frictions and political shocks. Finally, we conclude that some forms of domination and intermediation in the Portuguese Angola were sustained by a correlation between juxtapositions and agglutinations, but only if two demands were attended: the enlargement of the economical exploitation through the transatlantic slave trade and the institutional and political penetration of the African continent.

Exercitando um escopo de análise histórico e eclético, a presente dissertação versará sobre o funcionamento de um sistema administrativo misto, arquitetado no formato de nodos interconectados, ou apenas rede, em prol da manutenção de um espaço jurisdicional ultramarino. Nessa empreitada, seremos guiados por duas traves-mestras: a primeira é o interesse nos fenômenos advindos dos contatos intersociais, a segunda é a análise perscrutada da documentação inserida nas Fontes para a história de Angola do século XVII, organizadas por Beatrix Heintze. Problematizando algumas das situações coetâneas pelas quais passavam a expansão portuguesa na África Centro-Ocidental, bem como nos debruçando sobre algumas das indagações levantadas por uma historiografia recente, defenderemos que havia uma série de movimentos ambivalentes e ambíguos no que tangia ao governo do domínio ultramarino da Angola portuguesa. Sucintamente, chamaremos atenção para a importância dos procedimentos e resoluções políticoadministrativas adotados naquele domínio, analisando as maneiras de arregimentação e condução de uma máquina de guerra portuguesa, destacando a importância da participação política de atores e sujeitos centro-africanos nos rumos políticos das chamadas conquistas e abordando as relações institucionais e econômicas entre Luanda e os entrepostos portugueses instalados no interior. Por excelência, as hierarquias internas e os contatos sociais e políticos luso-africanos foram gestados em um ambiente conflituoso, entrecortado por tensões sociais, atritos institucionais e embates políticos. Em ultima instância, concluiremos que ocorriam justaposições e aglutinações entre as formas de dominação e intermediação que faziam parte do funcionamento político e institucional da Angola portuguesa, contanto que duas precondições fossem atendidas: o engrandecimento da exploração economia através do tráfico transatlântico e a penetração institucional e política do continente. / Considering an eclectic and historical scope of analysis, this dissertation will argue about the execution of a mixed administrative system, based on institutional nodes interconnected in a form of network system, operated on the behalf of an overseas jurisdictional space. Our efforts will be engaged with two mainstreams: the first is our interest in the phenomena related with some inter-social contacts, the second is the analytical research of the Fontes para a história de Angola do século XVIIs documentation, organized by Beatrix Heintze. Casting some questions related to the different situations concerned with the Portuguese Expansion in the West Central Africa, as well as reflecting some inquiries posed by the recent historiography, here we stand for a settle of ambivalent and ambiguous series of movements emerged from the Portuguese Angolas overseas domain, calling up for the importance of some political and institutional forms of proceedings. They were all managed in order to resolve some issues related with the Portuguese Angola, paying attention to the recruitment and mobilizations of the Portuguese war machine, elucidating how the local political actors interacted with the conquistas and how was carried out the institutional and economical relations between Luanda and the interior entrepôts. All the internal hierarchies and luso-african contacts was settled down in a conflictive environment, crossed through social tensions, institutional frictions and political shocks. Finally, we conclude that some forms of domination and intermediation in the Portuguese Angola were sustained by a correlation between juxtapositions and agglutinations, but only if two demands were attended: the enlargement of the economical exploitation through the transatlantic slave trade and the institutional and political penetration of the African continent.

This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice and sound play in these literary texts and the deconstructive-ethical philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. This thesis argues that these texts invoke the sonic materiality of voice in the service of responding to the disremembered dead through mourning and acknowledgment.