The Atlantic History Colloquium generates innovative scholarship on the relations linking Africa, Europe and the Americas by investigating the expansion of markets during the slave trade; the production of literary texts and forms of historical memory; the politics of religious dissent and conversion; the growth of colonial science and cartography; Native American ethnogenesis; the rise of abolitionist and Pan-African ideologies; and the dynamics of race, gender and creolization throughout the Atlantic world.
Atlantic History Faculty & Students
Coordinating Committee 2022-2023: Carla Pestana, Andrew Apter, Robin Derby, Elizabeth Landers.
Department of History Faculty: Andrew Apter, Robin Derby, Catherine Hall, Robert Hill, Robin Kelley, Fernando Pérez Monte sinos, Carla Pestana, Debbie Silverman, Brenda Stevenson, Bill Summerhill, Kevin Terraciano, Mary Terrall, Craig Yirush.
Interdisciplinary Affiliated Faculty: Scot Brown, Judith Carney, Elizabeth Deloughrey, Aisha Finch, Peter James Hudson, Jorge Marturano, Alex Mazzaferro, Stella Nair, Jemima Pierre, Patrick Polk, Allen Roberts, Dominic Thomas.
Graduate Students: Tania Bride, Jeannette Charles, Desmond Fonseca, Thabisile Griffin, Elizabeth Landers, Javier Muñoz.
EVENTS FOR 2023
SPRING EVENTS 2023
April 6, 2023
Patrícia Martins Marcos, UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow
The Empire of White Patriarchs: Population, Race-Making, and the Sciences of Human Improvement in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic (1730-1800)
In 1750, when the Brazilian border expanded by several orders of magnitude, Portuguese Crown officials, administrators, and men of science received the news with hope and apprehension. While the growth of frontiers of Portugal’s possession in the Americas was celebrated, it also presented formidable challenges for settlement. How could a diminutive metropole whose empire stretched across the four corners of the globe, secure its new territorial gains? Drawing on Newtonian physics, novel anthropological thinking about the human as a species, and the accounting technology of “Political Arithmetic,” Portuguese imperial administrators launched a policy known as the “political mechanism.” Recognizing how “population is everything,” this talk historicizes the emergence of racial whitening (branqueamento) as a project of human improvement and “population multiplication.” Arguing that producing bigger and better population futures became the chief scientific project of eighteenth-century Portuguese imperialism, I demonstrate how reform was undergirded by the forging of a new ideal of subjecthood: the salaried laborer. The salaried laborer became, I argue, the embodiment of a new ideal of whiteness (or white subjecthood). The end-goal of a new imperial science of human improvement was premised on the remolding of “rustics” into workers. In the Amazon, the key site where I will focus on in this talk, a new Crown policy promised to assimilate Amerindians and Roma people into whiteness through productive and reproducible labor. This talk excavates the racialized and gendered conditions of possibility for whitening through pronatalism, human speciation, and patriarchal rule.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
April 17-20, 2023*
"Liminality and Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern World"
CMRS-CEGS Workshop
April 20, 2023
Mika Lior, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Malta
"Circling With/In: Choreographies of Gendered & Regendered Agency in Bahian Candomblé"
This paper addresses choreographies of invocation and incorporation in the Afro-Brazilian ritual complex of Candomblé through the lenses of indigenous feminisms, dance studies and critical ethnography. Intervening in the dominant representation of Africana religious performance as predicated on acts of "possession," I show how circling with and in the saint (“rodar com” and “no santo”) operates as a movement-oriented and worldmaking practice of relational embodiment. Dwelling on practitioners' use of circular body aesthetics and spatial pathways, I trace Yoruba-Atlantic understandings of gendered and regendered agency across Candomblé’s mother-centric social structures, feminist aesthetic politics and performances of ritual gender fluidity. In conclusion, I consider how circling with/in can also constitute a reciprocal and reflexive research method and share Ogum’s Story, a collaborative film project conceived by and co-created with Candomblé elder Dona Cici.
Location: Zoom
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
May 4, 2023
Kevin Dawson, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Merced
“Liquid Motion: Surfing, Surf-Canoeing, and the Atlantic Slave Trade”
Atlantic Africa—the region extending from Senegal to Angola—has few natural harbors, compelling Africans to cross through surf to reach fisheries and coastal shipping lanes. Sources suggest that one thousand years ago Africans independently developed surfing to understand how to design and surf waves ashore in surf-canoes loaded with fish cargo. Today, Atlantic Africans remain the only people to harness wave energy as part of their daily labor practices. Even as Europeans crossed oceans, their rowboats were too slow to navigate African surf-zones, and routinely capsized. Hence, surf-canoemen transported most of the goods imported into and exported out of Africa between ship-and-shore, including the majority of the twelve million captives shipped into Atlantic slavery. This talk considers how African maritime wisdom and expertise informed the cultural and economic development of the Atlantic world.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
May 16, 2023*
Vikram Tamboli, UCLA
Malabar, Gentoo, and Pariah: Thinking about South Asian Blackness & Caste in South Asia and the Caribbean
Bunche Hall - Room 10383
Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
May 19-20, 2023*
Clark Library Conference "From Bodies to Things: The Commodification of Human Life in the Early Modern Atlantic" organized by Tawny Paul and Andrew Apter (UCLA)
June 1, 2023
Mélanie Cournil, Senior Lecturer in British History at the Sorbonne University
"Transatlantic Circulation of Botanical Knowledge : The Glasgow Years of William Jackson Hooker (1820-1841)"
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
WINTER EVENTS 2023
February 2, 2023
Brett Rushforth, Associate Professor, University of Oregon
“Consuming Colonialism: The Atlantic World in Sixteenth-Century France”
Contrary to prevailing wisdom, France played an important role in the sixteenth-century Atlantic, and vice-versa. During the century following Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, hundreds of thousands of French sailors, fishers, whalers, traders, and pirates left France for West Africa and the Americas. They returned with a stunning variety of goods: pepper, ivory, gold, and feathers from modern Liberia; waxes, gums, civet cats, and bullock hides from Senegambia; dyewoods, parrots, monkeys, and cotton from Brazil; fish, whale oil, baleen, and furs from Newfoundland and Canada; sugar, hides, pearls, and silver from the Caribbean and Central America. Atlantic encounters also brought a flood of stories, images, and bodies into France in ways that exoticized distant people and built demand for the resources they produced.
This talk will outline the ways that French people consumed and created meaning from Atlantic goods, information, and people during the sixteenth century. It reveals the central role played by women in bringing the Atlantic into France. As keepers of oral traditions cooks, hat sellers, costume makers, and weavers of dyed threads, women performed a significant proportion of the work that transformed the goods brought from Africa and the Americas to French shores. Much of this work occurred in the intimate spaces of households, workshops, kitchens, and marketplaces. Men, too, of course, consumed and displayed colonial products, as well as specialized knowledge about distant places, in ways that earned them social currency. Sailors and fishermen returned from their voyages with stories to tell, which they shared (and no doubt embellished) at wharves, taverns, marketplaces, and workshops. Merchants and financiers flaunted their newfound Atlantic wealth with statues, friezes, wall-hangings, and other decorations featuring West African and American images. Those with more cerebral inclinations created atlases and wrote cosmographies, trying to impose order on a world made new and unfamiliar by a century of Atlantic exchanges. New foods and medicines appeared featuring Atlantic trade goods, sought for the mystique of their distant origins. References to African and American places and peoples filtered into literary culture, appearing by the mid-sixteenth century in popular travel narratives, poetry, short stories, essays, and plays.
These sixteenth-century commercial exchanges implicated hundreds of thousands of French subjects—from wealthy financiers to common workers and their families—in the spread of overseas colonialism for the next three centuries.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
February 15, 2023*
Erin Rowe, Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
"The Black Saints of the Carmelite Order: Ancient Ethiopia in the Early Modern European Imagination”
Beginning in the seventeenth-century, members of the Carmelite order adopted two ancient Ethiopian saints, Efigenia and Elesban. While their interest in ancient saints was tied to the order’s longstanding efforts to prove the antiquity of their order dating back to the Prophet Elijah, the inclusion of Ancient Ethiopia in these efforts tell a more complex story about how early modern Spaniards thought with and about Ancient Ethiopia. The inclusion of Ethiopia in early modern ideas about the Biblical Near East clashed with the treatment of enslaved people from West and Central Africa being brought to the peninsula in vast numbers, while devotion to Ethiopian saints by White and Black Spaniards transformed the spiritual and historical landscape.
*Co-sponsored by Department of History, CMRS-CEGS, The Atlantic History Colloquium, Peter H. Reill Chair in European Studies, and The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
Bunche Hall 6275
Time: 2:00-3:30 pm
February 16, 2023
Madina Thiam, Assistant Professor of History, NYU
"Absolutely and Utterly Free: An Atlantic-Saharan Journey through Slavery and Race-Making, 1834-1836"
This talk follows Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Watara, a Timbuktu-born teenager who was enslaved in Jamaica from 1805 to 1834. Upon securing his manumission, Watara undertook a trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan journey, in a bid to return home. A close examination of Watara’s words and writings about him, and a reconstruction of his trajectory, provides insight into the social and political forces that ushered in deep changes in the worlds of the British Atlantic and Muslim Sahel and Sahara, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As Watara sought to secure freedom while journeying across the Atlantic and Sahara, which strategies did he leverage? How did larger political changes in 1820s-1830s Sahel, Sahara, and Atlantic render his aspirations to freedom possible, and how did they restrict them? Scholars have previously written about Watara’s journey and writings by situating his autobiography within the broader genre of transatlantic slave narratives, and analyzing his trajectory as evidence of the retention of African cultural expressions among enslaved Black Muslims in the Americas.
This talk offers a new interpretation of Watara’s articulation and praxis of freedom, framing them in the broader contexts of the end of chattel slavery in the British Atlantic, booming trans-Saharan slave trade, and changing notions of race and enslaveability in the West African Sahel in the era of Islamic revolutions and state-building.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
March 9, 2023
Marc Hertzman, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
"Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife"
Most histories of Palmares, the sprawling collection of settlements in Brazil that became perhaps history’s largest fugitive slave society, end in 1695, when colonial forces assassinated the famous rebel leader Zumbi. My book project plays the story forward into the eighteenth century to propose a new way to think about maroon communities across the Americas. Palmares and other such settlements have rightfully been understood as spaces of diasporic refuge and resistance; but unless descendants can trace their lineage directly back to them, through land possession or genealogy, scholars implicitly define them as endpoints: formerly enslaved people either lived out their days there or were recaptured or killed. I advance a new framework that treats maroon communities as points of origin, capable of generating their own unique diasporas. Along with Palmares’s previously overlooked human diaspora—members who were captured in or fled Palmares—I examine the pathways along which inheritances and memories of Zumbi and Palmares survived after 1695: canonical historical texts; the lives and travels of soldiers who fought against Palmares; soldiers’ claims (most embellished) to killing Zumbi, which they turned into heritable wealth; previously ignored place names that made elements of the natural landscape memorials to Palmares and Zumbi; and spiritual traditions, which remain an important locus of history and memory.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
FALL EVENTS 2022
November 10, 2022
Desmond Fonseca, PhD student, UCLA Department of History
Cuba and Cape Verde: Revolutionary Connections across the Pan-African Atlantic
Cape Verde has long been a backwater in studies of 20th century socialist, anti-colonial and pan-African organizing. While the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) has been the subject of much historical and political reverence, the majority of scholarly work on the PAIGC has focused on its military and pedagogical successes in Guinea-Bissau. This reality is also a reflection of historical perceptions of the struggle. In the 1960s and 70s, political actors would regularly refer to Guinea-Bissau and excise mention of Cape Verde despite the fact that the political unity between the two colonial territories was a foundational principle of the party’s existence. Nevertheless, the struggle of anti-colonial organizing in Cape Verde offers numerous insights into the ramifications of international and transatlantic solidarity in the mid-late 20th century, as well as dynamics of race and class across the oceanic divide. This presentation explores the role Cuba played as an incubator and partner in the development of the anti-colonial struggle not only in Cape Verde, but across the Portuguese empire in Africa. Through the training of guerrillas, hosting of PAIGC delegations and the political relationships between iconic Cuban figures such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro with Amilcar Cabral, the transatlantic relationship of these island nation-states offers a means to consider the utility of the “Atlantic” as a framework through which to understand the histories of 20th century anti-colonialism, the concrete utility of solidarity organizing and studies of international solidarity.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom: RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
Postponed - December 1, 2022
Melissa Morris, Asst. Professor of History, University of Wyoming
Pirates which infest that coast’: Illicit Trade and Imperial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Western Hispaniola
This presentation considers the illicit trade of tobacco and other goods from Western Hispaniola. French, Dutch, and English ships came from the 1560s to trade with the diverse groups living there—Indigenous, Spanish, and African. In response, in 1605-6, western and northwestern Hispaniola and other centers of tobacco cultivation were depopulated. The Spanish forcibly resettled residents, burned their towns, and issued a decree banning tobacco cultivation. These harsh measures, however, were far from the end of the island’s tobacco trade, or of interlopers’ presence. Some residents refused to move, and they were now joined by French and Dutch buccaneers. By 1630, they had several tobacco plantations in western Hispaniola. This chapter relies upon documents in several languages and from diverse archives to tell the story of the Spanish illicit trade and depopulations, the subsequent rise of interlopers who were loyal to no empire, and the eventual takeover of western Hispaniola by the French.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom RSVP
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
SPRING EVENTS 2022
April 7, 2022
Catherine Hall, Professor of History, University College London
Racial Capitalism across the Black/White Atlantic
Racial capitalism is a term that is increasingly widely used – but how should we define it and how does it operate? Racisms and capitalisms are two separate set s of practices – how do they intersect to function as a system in particular times and places? This talk will focus on racial capitalism as it operated across the mid-eighteenth century Atlantic, utilizing Edward Long’s three volume History of Jamaica (1774). Read now, in the twenty-first century, the History explicates for us the workings of the sugar business, the plantation, and capitalist accumulation, dependent as they were on racialized formations.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom RSVP
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
April 13, 2022
Melissa Morris, Asst. Professor of History, University of Wyoming
"Pirates which infest that coast’: Illicit Trade and Imperial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Western Hispaniola"
This presentation considers the illicit trade of tobacco and other goods from Western Hispaniola. French, Dutch, and English ships came from the 1560s to trade with the diverse groups living there—Indigenous, Spanish, and African. In response, in 1605-6, western and northwestern Hispaniola and other centers of tobacco cultivation were depopulated. The Spanish forcibly resettled residents, burned their towns, and issued a decree banning tobacco cultivation. These harsh measures, however, were far from the end of the island’s tobacco trade, or of interlopers’ presence. Some residents refused to move, and they were now joined by French and Dutch buccaneers. By 1630, they had several tobacco plantations in western Hispaniola. This chapter relies upon documents in several languages and from diverse archives to tell the story of the Spanish illicit trade and depopulations, the subsequent rise of interlopers who were loyal to no empire, and the eventual takeover of western Hispaniola by the French.
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom RSVP
Time: 4:00-6:00 pm
April 21, 2022
James Sweet, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and State Capture in the Revolutionary Atlantic World
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom RSVP
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
The slave ship Black Prince departed Bristol, England, in 1768, bound for Old Calabar in West Africa. Before reaching the African coast, the ship’s crew mutinied, murdering the captain and officers. The mutineers renamed the ship “Liberty,” elected new officers, and set sail for Brazil. This talk traces the dramatic story of the mutiny, as well as the merchant-owners’ response to the uprising. At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince’s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. This counter-revolution extended well beyond the realm of economic protectionism into corporate diplomacy, surveillance, arrest, extradition, and capital punishment. In this way, even in an era of professed liberty and freedom, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies, presaging a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world.
May 19, 2022
Jutta Wimmler, Research Group Leader "The Concept of Slavery in African History”, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
Integrating Central and Eastern Europe into Atlantic History: Some Reflections
A growing number of researchers have investigated Central and Eastern Europe’s ties to the Atlantic World in the past fifteen years – a field that continues to grow. This research not only illustrates that the “heartland” of Europe was an integral part of the early modern Atlantic (and global) economy. Since this region’s engagement with the wider world was not identical to that of the “sea powers,” it also calls for a reassessment of Atlantic history as a perspective on the early modern world. This presentation will highlight some of the major research findings of the past years and will ask if and how they impact our understanding of Atlantic History.
Zoom RSVP
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
WINTER EVENTS 2022
All events will be held on Thursdays from 12:30pm to 2:00pm unless otherwise noted. * Outside Events.
January 27, 2022
Degenhart Brown, PhD Candidate, UCLA World Arts and Cultures
Spiritscapes’ as ‘Atlantic Modernities’: Examining the Ritual Pathways of Spirit Possession and ‘Fetish’ Objects in West Africa
Location: Zoom RSVP
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
In this presentation I explore how the dense vectors of material culture and spirit possession established in the crucible of the modern era continue to inform the decisions of millions of west Africans as they navigate everyday realities at home and abroad. In the first half of this talk, I explore emerging themes in “fetish modernity” theory to demonstrate how, as mediators of modern history, “fetish” objects, through their own semantic and epistemological ambivalence, have changed the ways in which scholars interpret historical conventions. In the second half, I look at some examples of the confluence of possession rituals and slavery discourse across contemporary west Africa to illustrate how the relationships between northern and southern “spirits,” resulting from hinterland slave raids, inform local interpretations of the ongoing legacies of trans-Atlantic slavery. I conclude by engaging the work of Charles Piot to demonstrate how power objects and ritual acts of possession are in themselves “alternative modernities” that have remained crucial ontological technologies in west Africa due to their capacity to efface national and international efforts to define and control west African lifeworlds.
February 10, 2022
Mary Terrall, Professor of History, UCLA
Transatlantic Blues: A French Botanist Experiments with Indigo
Location: Hybrid
Bunche Hall 6275
Zoom RSVP
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
February 24, 2022
Bradley Craig, Assistant Professor of History, Concordia University (Montréal)
Oathbound: The Trelawny Maroons of Jamaica in the Revolutionary Atlantic World
Location: Zoom: RSVP
Time: 1:00-2:30 pm
Forcibly removed from Jamaica in 1796 after waging war against the colonial state, the Trelawny Maroons boarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia, where they struggled against the colonial government until 1800, when they were relocated to Sierra Leone. This talk follows the Maroons across these three different British colonies in order to reconsider the political history of the Atlantic world. To tell the story of the Trelawny Maroons is to tell a characteristically Atlantic story whereby different groups reconstituted their sense of belonging in the face of flux and dislocation—an impulse common to Africans, indigenous Americans, and Europeans alike from the onset of the Atlantic age of exploration. War, enslavement, mercantilism, and imperial expansion facilitated the meeting of strangers and the making of kin. At the center of these Atlantic narratives are shared strivings—often violent, yet always creative—to persist in a world marked by rupture and discontinuity. I argue that the Maroons engaged in a radical worldmaking project rooted in an Atlantic political culture of oath-making that allowed them to recast their political subjectivity across different colonial spaces. The Maroons endeavored to bind themselves to a radical vision of fragmented sovereignty and a sense of diasporic community, revealing the deep historical connections between sovereignty and intimacy. By adopting a diasporic emphasis on ritual, materiality, and belonging, this project reorients a historiography of Black Atlantic revolutionary politics that too often emerges from a linear, progressive, and state-oriented perspective.
FALL EVENTS 2021
All events will be held virtually on Zoom, Thursdays from 12:30pm to 2:00pm unless otherwise noted. * Outside Events.
October 6-8, 2021*
Pandemic Legacies: Health, Healing, and Medicine in the Age of Slavery and Beyond
Lapidus Center Conference, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Just as the slave trade tied together the cultures and populations of four continents, it also wed together distinctive disease ecologies. The lack of local populations with exploitable labor in the Americas compelled an increase in the volume of Africans that Europeans forced into the transatlantic slave trade, setting the stage for epidemic diseases and other health issues that shaped the cultural, social, and material life of Atlantic slavery. Genocidal warfare and the destructive effects of Eurasian African epidemic diseases caused the near decimation of Indigenous populations. Yellow fever, a virus native to tropical West Africa, became a common scourge to American ports. Doctors theorizing about the virus developed racial stereotypes that posited that people of African descent were inherently immune to the virus, setting the stage for a range of healthcare disparities that reverberate today.
October 14, 2021
Degenhart Brown, PhD Candidate, UCLA World Arts and Cultures
“’Spiritscapes’ as ‘Atlantic Modernities’: Examining the Ritual Pathways of Spirit Possession and ‘Fetish’ Objects in West Africa.”
Location: Zoom
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
In this presentation I explore how the dense vectors of material culture and spirit possession established in the crucible of the modern era continue to inform the decisions of millions of west Africans as they navigate everyday realities at home and abroad. In the first half of this talk, I explore emerging themes in “fetish modernity” theory to demonstrate how, as mediators of modern history, “fetish” objects, through their own semantic and epistemological ambivalence, have changed the ways in which scholars interpret historical conventions. In the second half, I look at some examples of the confluence of possession rituals and slavery discourse across contemporary west Africa to illustrate how the relationships between northern and southern “spirits,” resulting from hinterland slave raids, inform local interpretations of the ongoing legacies of trans-Atlantic slavery. I conclude by engaging the work of Charles Piot to demonstrate how power objects and ritual acts of possession are in themselves “alternative modernities” that have remained crucial ontological technologies in west Africa due to their capacity to efface national and international efforts to define and control west African lifeworlds.
October 28, 2021
Alex Mazzaferro, Assistant Professor of English, UCLA
UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC)
“Hurricanes, Unsettlement, and Indigenous Knowledge in the Early Modern Caribbean.”
This article in-progress places the history of New World science into dialogue with Native American and Indigenous Studies by using the exchange of meteorological knowledge as a window into the political conflict between English settlers and Native Kalinago people in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.
Location: Zoom
Time: 4:00 pm
November 1, 2021
Chris Willoughby, Fellow Huntington Library
"The Medical Chattel Principle: Experiments on Enslaved People and Animals in the United States, 1840-1860."
Cohosted with UCLA History of Science
Location: Bunche Hall 5288
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm
In this paper excerpted from my book manuscript Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools, I examine how medical students in the 1840s and 1850s created an experimental praxis based in classifications of enslaved African descendants as residing between whites and animals taxonomically. Specifically, the paper compares how physicians and medical students in the United States and Atlantic World experimented on enslaved people, whites, and animals, through an analysis of previously unknown animal vivisections and life-threatening experiments on enslaved patients conducted by students at the Medical College of the State of South Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania.
Notable compared to the more well-known cases of experimental surgeries tested on enslaved patients, these students conducted potentially-fatal physiological experiments with no therapeutic purpose on healthy people. In one case, a student deliberately infected a patient with measles in a convoluted effort to prove that people of African descent were immune to yellow fever. In a second case, a student induced nicotine toxicity on a nursing, enslaved mother, before forcing her to breastfeed her infant, testing the effects of tobacco on breastfeeding. In these cases, students showed a remarkable callousness toward their enslaved patients that reflected the devaluation and animalization of black life. These experiments, however, were less dangerous than the fatal vivisections conducted on animals, as when a student at the University of Pennsylvania opened a dog’s chest cavity to see its heart beat. None of these students received anything but praise for their violent tests. Thus, I argue that physicians’ experimental approach to enslaved people simultaneously reinforced and mirrored racial scientists’ placement of African descendants in a liminal position between whites and the rest of the animal kingdom, turning medical theory into praxis.
November 18, 2021
Pablo Sierra, Associate Professor of History, Rochester University
“Performing Refugees: Asylum, Blackness, and Piracy in Santo Domingo/Saint-Domingue, 1675-1700.”
Location: Zoom
Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm
The May 1683 raid on the port of Veracruz forever altered the course of Black history in Mexico, Saint-Domingue, and Santo Domingo. In the months that followed, no less than 1,400 people of African descent were taken from Veracruz by a buccaneer fleet and violently dispersed throughout the Atlantic seaboard. Yet, the experiences of those free and enslaved captives have been largely forgotten in favor of narratives on the next pirate attack and subsequent acts of retaliation. This paper asks us to center the documented (and perhaps, the undocumented) experiences of captives-turned-refugees on the rugged borderlands of Hispaniola instead. In particular, I focus on the legal strategies and cultural scripts that African-descended people performed when presented before Spanish authorities in Santo Domingo. How did afrodescendiente refugees frame their lifestories and to what end? If permanence in, or departure from, Santo Domingo depended on a persuasive narrative, what rhetorical strategies do we detect in these depositions? Finally, how do refugee thoughts, actions, and motivations alter our perception of Mexico, the Caribbean, and African diaspora?
December 2, 2021
Sara Johnson, Associate Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Black Studies Project at UC San Diego
"Between the Archive and the Speculative Turn: Notes on a Communal Biography of Moreau de Saint-Méry."
All roads in French Caribbean historiography intersect with the work of the Martinican philosophe Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819). A lawyer, printer, naturalist, and translator who was at the forefront of revolutionary politics on two continents, Moreau wrote about the ideals of liberty and equality as he trafficked in human beings. This talk draws from my book to discuss the process of creating a communal biography that foregrounds the free people of color and enslaved women and men who enabled Moreau’s lifestyle and professional work. My discussion focuses on storytelling methodologies, particularly the ways that I combine archival work with experimental historiography that plays with visual culture, formatting and alternate narrative forms. I present excerpts from a “Black Encyclopedia,” based on Moreau’s own colonial encyclopedia, and several visuals that use fragmentary evidence to recreate his household communities.
Location: Zoom
Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm
EVENTS FOR 2020-2021
FALL EVENTS 2020
All events will be held virtually on Zoom, Thursdays from 12:30pm to 2:00pm unless otherwise noted. * Outside Events.
September 18, 2020*
The Early Modern Global Caribbean Conference, Huntington Library
September 25, 2020*
October 29, 2020
Alejandra Dubcovsky, Associate Professor of History, UC Riverside
"Iquenibilahacu, iquibitila, Killed but not Extinguished, Centering Native Women in the Early South."
In 1695 a Chacato woman was killed far from home and kin. Who was this woman? How did she manage to travel so far? Why was she murdered? This talk explores the life and death of this unnamed Chacato woman. She offers a surprising and quite different view of the contested colonial world she both inhabited and helped shape. She disappears as quickly as she appears in discussions about community, social breakdown, order, balance, and family. She reveals intimate, at times even tactile, understanding of the interpersonal relations that defined her life, which unfolded in the simultaneity of empire building and colonial conflict. Allowing her to tell her story relies on the available colonial documents but refuses to let them dictate the terms of historical engagement. Her violent death, the trial that followed, and the many uncertainties that surrounded both, show how Native women were a central force in the making and unmaking of the early Southeast.
November 6-7, 2020*
Cuban Slavery and the Atlantic World, The MacMillan Center of Yale University
The Gilder Lehrman Center’s 22nd Annual International Conference provides a forum for discussion of the study of Cuban slavery and emancipation today, placing the island’s history within the wider Atlantic world. Over the past few decades, the study of Cuban history has been an increasingly international effort. Cuban historians have interacted more and more with colleagues from abroad, with discussions grounded in the unique primary sources found in the rich Cuban archives. These scholars have demonstrated the importance of understanding Cuban slavery within the context of the Atlantic world and broad colonial networks of domination and resistance. This conference brings together scholars from Cuba and abroad working on the transatlantic slave trade, resistance, systems of control, abolition and emancipation, and the memory and legacies of slavery in Cuba. Join us for in-depth conversations about the present and future of understanding slavery and its long aftermath in this crucial part of the world.
November 19, 2020
Thabisile Griffin, PhD Candidate, UCLA
"Black Militias in the Era of Revolutions: Politics, Race and Labor"
From 1781 to 1790, the British Caribbean military and colonial administrators struggled with renegotiating their racial truth systems - through a recalibration of defense. The last two decades of the century were ripe with not only the insurrections of enslaved Africans, but also threats from competing European powers and indigenous populations. In order to survive, there were constant re-adjustments made to garrison structure and fortifications, that ultimately disrupted racial sensibilities to security. A contentious reinforcement would develop in the 1780s, incentivized by previous strategies used during the American Revolution. Military officials and colonial administrators in the Caribbean were now reckoning with the possibility of employing and arming entire battalions of Black men for the British Army. The creation of this unit in the Caribbean, the Black Corps, was only possible through the evolving myths and villainization of St. Vincent’s Black indigenous population—the Black Caribs. Only through the narrative of the Black Caribs could the fantasy of the Black Corps be actualized.
WINTER EVENTS 2021
All events will be held virtually on Zoom, Thursdays from 12:30pm to 2:00pm unless otherwise noted. * Outside Events.
January 14, 2021
Tawny Paul, Director of the Public History Initiative, Department of History, UCLA
Commodified Bodies: Debt Bondage and Maritime Labor Recruitment in the British Atlantic
Many forms of coerced labor existed in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. A variety of mechanisms, from indenture to convict transportation, facilitated coercive recruitment. This paper explores one of these mechanisms, debt bondage, and its practice in domestic England where it was used to forcibly recruit sailors for the Royal Navy. I focus on debt’s capacity to commodify bodies in both formal and informal ways, and on the forms of agency available to individuals to commodify their own bodies. One of the consequences of capitalism was that Britons became used to thinking about their bodies as commodifiable, blurring the distinctions between bodies and things. By examining the link between debt and coerced labor, it becomes possible not only to trace a direct route from Britain’s overflowing debtors’ prisons to Atlantic labor markets, but to uncover the state’s role in commodifying bodies for imperial labor.
January 30, 2021*
Early Modern Studies Institute USC-Huntington: American Origins [10:30 am - 12 noon (PST)]
Christopher Blakley, Loyola Marymount University and Occidental College
"'Showing Their Slaves How to Collect': Enslaved People and the Foundations of Animal Knowledge"
This presentation explores how enslaved people and the geography of slaving between slave castles in Atlantic Africa, depots in New Spain, and plantations within England’s colonies in the Caribbean shaped the development of knowledge about animals and the networks that developed in the Enlightenment as so-called Linnaean science matured before and after the American Revolutionary War. Blakley investigates how Atlantic African judgment, curiosity, and suffering produced knowledge about animals throughout the Atlantic world; and how slavers and slaveholders came to rely upon the enslaved and the carceral geography of slavery as sources of scientific knowledge.
February 4, 2021
Sasha Turner, Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
"Negotiating Slavery and Motherhood on the Terrain of Feelings."
This presentation centers on the story of Abba, an enslaved woman who was the mother of an unusually large family in eighteenth century Jamaica. Abba had been pregnant thirteen times. She had ten live births and one still birth. We come to know Abba’s story through the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, notorious among scholars of slavery because of his practice of diarizing how he daily tortured the enslaved. In addition to her large family, Abba stands out in the diaries because, despite Thistlewood’s notoriety as a sadistic enslaver, he whips Abba only three times in almost thirty years of claiming power over her life and body. By contrast, Thistlewood was exceptionally generous to Abba providing her with well needed material goods to support her family and permitting her to perform spiritual rituals, outlawed a felony, to grieve the death of her children. Reading Abba’s life against the 18th Century burgeoning culture of sensibility, including Thistlewood’s own displays of sympathy and grief to white community members, this discussion explores Abba's deployment of feelings in negotiating her condition. How did Abba’s displays of feeling mirror Thistlewood’s, and what did Abba seek to gain by consistently exhibiting feelings in Thistlewood presence?
March 11, 2021
Jenna Gibbs, Associate Professor of History, Florida International University
In early nineteenth century New York, the short-lived all-African American theatre troupe, the African Grove Theater, challenged slavery, racism, and restrictions on free African Americans’ voting and civil rights. To do so, the proprietor, William Brown, bravely set up shop next door to the established white fixture, the Park Theatre, and then proceeded to daringly set his company’s calendar as provocation: whatever play the Park produced, Brown’s African Grove ensemble immediately staged their own counter-productions. This talk will focus on two of the African Grove’s adaptations and political interpolations against this racially charged backdrop: William Moncrief’s Life in London; or Tom and Jerry and John Fawcett’s Obi, or Three Finger’d Jack. My talk will conclude with a brief glimpse into how this thespian tradition of protest continues today in the New African Grove Theater in New York and its namesakes’ elsewhere, such as CSU Dominguez Hills.
SPRING EVENTS 2021
All events will be held virtually on Zoom, Thursdays from 12:30pm to 2:00pm unless otherwise noted. * Outside Events.
April 1, 2021
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University
"East Atlantic Crossings Before 1550"
Atlantic historians tend to understand transoceanic crossings along an east-west axis, with people and goods seen as traversing the space between Africa and/or Europe, on the one hand, and the Americas, on the other. Yet in the early decades of the sixteenth century, even as the broader contours of Atlantic circumnavigation were becoming more evident to members of various maritime communities, impressions of transoceanic mobility did not yet assume the east-west axis as normative. Frequently traveled thoroughfares linking Seville to the Canaries, São Tomé to the Azores, and Cabo Verde to Rouen were themselves widely seen as transoceanic in scope, even if they hewed to the eastern side of the Atlantic. The weight of tradition lay behind this conventional wisdom. Maritime routes spanning the Gulf of Guinea, the Atlantic islands, and Iberia had since the mid fifteenth century established patterns of voluntary and coerced movement that continued to be integral to an expanding Atlantic circuit even after 1492. In considering the shifting yet continually vital role of the eastern Atlantic corridor, this talk seeks to recover a largely overlooked geographic and temporal dimension of early Atlantic history. It does so by bringing together individual stories of conflict, negotiation, and struggle waged by a diverse range of individuals who interacted, in different ways, with the breadth and dynamism of the east Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
April 15, 2021
Barbara Krauthamer, Professor of History, UMass Amherst
"Liberty’s Diaspora: Black Women in the Age of the American Revolution"
This presentation examines the lives of three Black women who had been enslaved in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution. The presentation reflects on their lives by considering the ways historians have navigated the archival gaps and silences about Black women’s presence. The presentation follows the women’s voluntary and forced migrations, their Diasporic routes, within the Americas and across the Atlantic. This focus on Black women’s routes of resistance, liberation and deportation adds a new dimension to the more familiar and male dominated stories of slavery, Black Loyalists and the American Revolution.
May 6, 2021
Elizabeth Schiffler, PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies, UCLA
"Snow Eggs: Situated Tastes and Partial Archives"
This talk traces a history of Snow Eggs, from its inception in American gastronomic history to a contemporary Los Angeles performance. Beginning with the recipe from 18th century Chef James Hemings, enslaved to President Jefferson, a study of Snow Eggs reveals the emerging technologies and relations between French and American gastronomy. Extending to the 2020 dinner series ‘Hemings & Hercules’ created by Chef Martin N. Draluck at Hatchet Hall in Los Angeles centers reenactment as a historical method that reveals historical, ecological, and technological entanglements. This talk challenges the dominant culinary narrative of the whiteness of French-American gastronomy, to position American cookbooks adapting French cuisine to be read, and performed, through the legacy of Hemings’ contribution to American foodways.
May 20, 2021
Devin Leigh, PhD Candidate in History at the University of California, Davis
The colonial archive has grown as a subject of interest among scholars of the Atlantic World in recent years. In particular, scholars of slavery have shown how the texts we navigate as historians were constructed as artifacts of power and violence, intended to further the work of colonization and enslavement. This presentation examines a particular chapter in the history of the colonial archive. It traces the parallel lives of two white gentlemen who were born in Great Britain, became enslavers in the West Indies and West Africa, and then produced works of History on Africa and peoples of African descent in the year 1793. It argues that these authors were representative of a new, transatlantic generation of colonial enslavers who were pushed by the rise of the abolition movement to think differently about the value of their experiences overseas. For the past three centuries, enslavers had collaborated with metropolitan chroniclers to produce new knowledge about the Atlantic World. The rise of an abolitionist movement in the metropole caused enslavers to lose trust in these inherited structures of knowledge production and to create an archive on their own.
June 3, 2021
Alea Adigweme, MFA student in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UCLA
In his hagiographic recounting of “the Carib War” — written in dedication to and with input from the conflict’s white survivors — Charles Shephard unintentionally documents the unsettled nature of Afro-Indigenous “defeat”in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Using Gérard Genette’s concept of the “paratext,” this stage of the project focuses specifically on peritextual elements of An Historical Account of the Island of Saint Vincent, which highlight the circuits of information, capital, and power that form the work’s foundation. Through a disambiguation of the “front matter” into inter-related, though discrete objects of inquiry, attending to the peritextual surfaces connections between Shephard, slaveowners, and a British parachurch organization, allowing a deeper understanding of the financial, affective, religious, and rhetorical mechanisms at play in the erasure of the Black Caribs, against whom the war Shepard recounts was fought.
Fall 2021
Sara Johnson, Associate Professor of Literature, UC San Diego
"Between the Archive and the Speculative Turn: Notes toward a Biography of Moreau de Saint-Méry.”
This talk considers the process of writing about the life and work of the Caribbean philosophe Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819). A lawyer, printer, naturalist, and translator who was at the forefront of revolutionary politics on two continents, Moreau was also a slaveholder who wrote about ideals of liberty even as he trafficked in human beings. An ardent defender of slavery as an institution, he nonetheless left some of the most detailed accounts of the social practices of enslaved women and men in the eighteenth-century Americas. This talk explores who knew what, and how, using as an example entries from his manuscript Repértoire des Notions Coloniales that I have refashioned into my own Encyclopédie noire. This work reconsiders how his production of colonial knowledge appears when assessed from alternate points of view. In a similar vein, I discuss the process and politics that surround a parallel project produced by Moreau’s brother-in-law, Baudry des Lozières. My methodology embraces the value of informed speculation—through chapters that experiment with form, visual imagery, and narrative voice—as a way to foreground the people of African descent who undergirded Moreau’s work on multiple levels, from those who managed his household to those whose knowledge about language, labor, and community became the basis of his work. I build upon fragmentary archival evidence to surmount the disproportionate influence of planters and administrators on Caribbean historiography.
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For further information about the Atlantic History Group, please send an email to Robin Derby (derby@history.ucla.edu).