A submarine cable on the abolitionist tide: media infrastructure against slavery in Ceará (1873-1888)

Abstract

Fortaleza is currently an Atlantic submarine cable hub, but the memories of this infrastructure’s presence in the city’s collective imaginary are yet to be safeguarded. When a submarine cable first landed on the shores of the capital of Ceará state in the early 1880s, electro-abolitionist and phantasmagorical narratives surfaced. By examining the political and familial ties of the British individual William John Ayres, superintendent of the Brazilian Submarine Telegraph Co., this article is grounded in both infrastructure studies and network archaeology to contribute to the previous research of historian Eduardo Silva. Silva’s work connects Brazilian abolitionism with the social, cultural, and political impacts of submarine cable technology’s arrival. The primary contribution of this article is to demonstrate that the political appropriation surrounding this infrastructure, as observed by Eduardo Silva in the context of the 1888 abolition process in Rio de Janeiro, was previously tested in the Ceará abolition of 1884.