Thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during the first half of the nineteenth century. Among them were individuals marked by incarceration: men, women, and adolescents transported from prisons in Europe to faraway destinations. From the ports of Hamburg, London, and Liverpool, vessels carried them to new, unfamiliar homes. In the early 1820s, formerly incarcerated men and women from the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin arrived on Brazil’s southern frontier, and in the late 1840s, adolescent boys left the correctional facility of Red Hill in England for the British Colony of Natal.

Our project explores how the histories of these individuals are related. These state-sponsored transportations were integral to an expansive imperial geography of carcerality. A network of interconnected ideas about the exercise of control through family settlements framed the Atlantic as both a physical and conceptual space. Individuals were not simply sent away; they were defined by their confinement, their perceived inability to integrate, and the hope that distance might achieve what incarceration alone could not. 

Developed with Victoria Bergbauer (Emory University).

This book project is based on an epistolary treasure: the letters that Carlos Schnell, a young German-Brazilian soldier, exchanged in an oral German dialect (Hunsrückisch) with his family living in the settlements of southern Brazil, while marching towards the Paraguayan War front.

The Schnells’ epistolary is a rare window into the ways a settler community goes to war and how patriotism is a matter-in-the-making among ethnic and racial others in a Brazil seeking to modernize through immigration policy and war. After Carlos’ death in the battle of Curupayty (1866), the Schnells joined the therapeutic-religious movement of the Mucker (‘False Saints’). A couple of years later, the family was decimated in a fratricidal conflict, spearheaded by a local germanist elite and veterans of the Paraguayan War. A close reading of this affective archive and related material and literary traces illuminates how German-Brazilian communities were foundational to the sustenance of patriotism in the bloodiest of South America’s wars and how, in the war’s aftermath, some people back in the colonies found ways to transcend the specter of death, while others learned to kill their neighbors in impunity.

The manuscript is co-authored with João Biehl (Anthropology, Princeton University)