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dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering.”3 Despite having argued that the Black Atlantic is transcultural in its rhizomorphic and fractal structure, transcending the “structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity,”4 Gilroy did not pay attention to Africa and Latin America, dismissing the diversity and inequalities that characterize this large geographical and conceptual zone.
The Internet version of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.com), coordinated by David Eltis, identifies the volume of the Luso-Brazilian slave trade, confirming the importance of the South Atlantic. Indeed, from 1501 to 1850, Portugal and Brazil imported about 5,100,000 enslaved Africans. Since the end of the seventeenth century, the Brazilian slave system relied, first, on the importation of large numbers of slaves, and, second, on a large number of manumissions. Brazil not only imported more than half of the total slave imports in the Americas but also ten times more than the total slave imports of the United States.5
Portuguese attempts to organize maritime companies were not as successful as the initiatives developed by other European powers, such as France, Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, and Denmark.6 The slave trade to Brazil remained mainly under the control of private merchants, many of them Brazilians. Moreover, the voyages very often did not follow the traditional triangular model. Slave merchants traveled between Brazil and the West and Central African coasts without the intervention of the Portuguese metropole. In this context, the region comprising the Brazilian coast and the Western and Central African coast constituted a zone marked by specific features.
The uniqueness of the South Atlantic system allows us to consider this region as an autonomous space, a mixed zone of social, economic, religious, and cultural exchanges.7 Examining the South Atlantic also provides an opportunity to better take into account the specific forms of exchanges that occurred in a region where the intensity and the volume of the slave trade were clearly much higher than in other Atlantic regions, where the slave trade voyages followed a direct model rather than the