Yuko Miki
Associate Professor and Associate Director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), History Department, Arts and Sciences
Dr. Yuko Miki is an award-winning historian of slavery in Brazil and the Iberian Atlantic World. Her book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018; paperback 2019) demonstrates how the intersecting histories of the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas were foundational to the formation of race, citizenship, and nation in nineteenth-century Brazil. Through a critical reading of various archives, it challenges a well-established historical narrative—perpetuated by many scholars—that Indian “disappearance” paved the way for the emergence of African diasporic nations in Latin America, particularly Brazil. To understand the fundamental issues that postcolonial Latin American nations confronted—slavery and abolition, the unequal access to citizenship, and constructions of racialized difference and national identity—she shows that it is essential to foreground the lives of both black and indigenous people. You can listen to her New Books Network interview and read a profile of her work in the Fordham News.
Frontiers of Citizenship has received awards and honors across multiple fields, including the Wesley-Logan Prize for African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association, the Warren Dean Memorial Prize for Brazilian History from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), and Honorable Mentions for the Howard F. Cline Prize for Latin American Ethnohistory (CLAH) and the Best Book Prize from the Latin American Studies Association’s 19 th -Century Section. It was also a finalist for the Outstanding First Book Award of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Her article, “Fleeing into Slavery,” an expanded version of which is in the book, received the LASA Brazil Section Best Article Prize and the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH) Nupur Chaudhuri Prize for Best First Article. She has also authored works in English and Portuguese that have appeared in edited volumes and journals including the Americas; Slavery & Abolition; and Social Text.
Miki is currently working on a new book project, Brazilian Atlantic: Archives and Stories of Illegal Slavery (working title). It is a history of the women, men, and children whose lives became enmeshed in the networks of illegal slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World linking Brazil with the U.S. North, West and West Central Africa, Cuba, Great Britain, and Portugal. The book weaves together past and present, historical characters and archival encounters into a single narrative. Drawing on methods of literary analysis and archival ethnography, the book departs from the quantitative approaches informing many studies of the slave trade. Miki argues that the gaps and contradictions in the historical records are themselves constitutive of the history of illegal slavery. By doing so, this project proposes a new way of writing about the ambiguous histories of slavery and freedom that resists the sweeping narrative of the “Age of Emancipation” and foregrounds the suffering and afterlives of the enslaved.
Interest in interrogating disciplinary boundaries and knowledge production informs another project in progress, tentatively entitled “To Tame or to Kill.” This work examines a Kongo-based secret society called Pemba in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil to explore the possibilities and limitations of understanding African epistemologies in the archives of slavery.
Miki’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center; and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She received her B.A. (magna cum laude) from Brown University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. Prior to joining Fordham, she was Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Washington University in St. Louis.