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.
CITATION STYLE
Marquez, J. C. (2021, May 1). Witnesses to freedom: Paula’s enslavement, her family’s freedom suit, and the making of a counterarchive in the South Atlantic World. HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-8897477
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