The middle passage was never the exclusive (or most terrible) means by which Africans or men and women of African descent circulated through the Atlantic World. Even as slavery remained an institution share by most American colonies or independent nations, Africans boarded ships to Louisiana, Guiana, Saint-Domingue, and Brazil. They had interests in these places (familial, commercial, religious, etc.) and thus risked travel and its consequences. Slaves, of course, also circulated as sailors, domestics, and fugitives. Some were sent to Europe as gifts or to learn a new skill. After successive abolitions of slavery, Africans came to the Americas, sometimes on the same boats that preceding generations had travelled as captives. Their status was that of indenture servants, “rescued” from slavery in Africa to work (quitelike slaves) in the plantations of post-slavery New World. These many ways of crossing the oceans and seas will be our topic. We will unveil them to understand how they have been important, early dimensions of the Black Atlantic.

- Céline Flory (EHESS, visiting professor in the Department of History): “Emancipation without Freedom: The Practice of African Captive ‘Repurchase’ in the French Post-slavery Era”
- Jessica Marie Johnson (John Hopkins University): “Crossings/La Traversée: African Women in New Orleans' Atlantic World before 1769”
- Jennifer Palmer (University of Georgia): “The Other Side of the Atlantic: Slavery and Servitude in Eighteenth-Century La Rochelle.”

Chair:
- Martha Jones (University of Michigan)
Comments:
- Jean Hébrard (EHESS and University of Michigan).