Atlantic History Colloquium
The Atlantic History Group 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 2023-2024: Carla Pestana, Andrew Apter, Robin Derby, Arranne Rispoli.
Department of History Faculty: Andrew Apter, Robin Derby, Catherine Hall, Robert Hill, Robin Kelley, Fernando Pérez Montesinos, Carla Pestana, Debbie Silverman, Brenda Stevenson, Bill Summerhill, Kevin Terraciano, 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, Arranne Rispoli
EVENTS FOR 2023-2024
SPRING 2024
April 25, 2024
Jose Monge (UCLA)
“A Wide Variety of Vessels: On the technical and social aspects of American Whaling, 18th-19th century”
Monge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. His dissertation, titled Maritime Labor, Candles, and the Architecture of the Enlightenment (1750-1872), focuses on the role that whale-originated illuminants, specifically spermaceti candles and oil, played in the American Enlightenment as an intellectual project and the U.S. as a country. By unravelling the tension between binaries such as intellectual and manual labor–the consumers that bought these commodities and the producers that were not able to afford them–the project understands architecture as a history of activities that moved from sea to land and land to sea, challenging assumptions about the static “nature” of architecture.
Location: Bunche Hall 6275 and on Zoom
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
May 16, 2024
Hannah Anderson (Toronto)
Dr. Hannah Anderson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of early America and she is interested in the history of science, environmental history, and gender history. Her book manuscript, Lived Botany: Settlers and Natural History in the Early British Atlantic, examines how settlers exchanged botanical knowledge with Indigenous people and how these interactions shaped the development of the science of natural history. Now at UA Little Rock, Dr. Anderson was formerly the University College Fellow in Early American History at the University of Toronto. She enjoys teaching courses on American history, the history of science and empires, environmental history, and the history of race. Dr. Anderson’s work has been supported by many institutions. Most recently, she has been a fellow of the McNeil Center of Early American Studies and the American Philosophical Society. In 2024, Dr. Anderson is a Dibner Long-Term Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in California.
Location: Bunche Hall 6275 and on Zoom
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
May 23, 2024
Melissa Morris (Wyoming)
“’Pirates which infest that coast’: Illicit Trade and Imperial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Western Hispaniola”
Dr. Melissa N. Morris is a historian of early America and the Atlantic World whose research is centered on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She is particularly interested in the cross-cultural interactions that defined colonial encounters, the role of plants in driving European expansion, the dissemination of geographic and agricultural knowledge, and colonial failures in the Americas. She completed her PhD in history at Columbia University in 2017. Dr. Morris’s first book project, “Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Origins of Empires, 1580-1740,” considers how tobacco helped the Dutch, English, and French establish empires in the Americas. It looks in particular at how Europeans relied upon indigenous and Spanish assistance to learn to cultivate tobacco, a crop they grew in nearly all their early colonies.
Location: Bunche 6275 and on Zoom
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM in
FALL 2023
October 19, 2023
Tanya Bride (UCLA History)
“Trails of Hoof and Pawprints: Tracing human-animal relations in colonial Mexico through the religious courts and Relaciones Geográficas”
Please note: This event will only be held via Zoom. It will not be in person.
November 9, 2023
Mike Jarvis (Rochester)
“Castle Cormantine and Early English Africa, 1632-1672”
Location: Bunche Hall 6275 and on Zoom
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
November 30, 2023
Justin Dunnavant (UCLA Anthropology)
“Denmark Vesey: A Caribbean Revolution in South Carolina”
Location: Bunche Hall 6275 and on Zoom
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
EVENTS FOR 2022-2023
SPRING EVENTS 2023
April 6, 2023
Patrícia Martins Marcos, UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge
“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.
Patrícia Martins Marcos (Ph.D History and Science Studies) is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge at UCLA’s History Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Her book manuscript, Imperial Whiteness, historicizes genealogies of racial improvement through whitening in the 18th Century Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic by linking histories of the life sciences, to medicine, gender and sexuality, and race. She is currently Associate Editor with the History of Anthropology Review and elected Early Career Representative for the History of Science Society—where she is also co-chair of the Early Sciences Forum. Her work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the John Carter Brown Library. She is currently a fellow with the Folger Shakespeare Library and next Fall she will be a visiting fellow at the Department of History of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG–Brazil) . Her most recent “Blackness out of Place,” was published with the Radical History Review and focuses on the epistemology of Black visual resistance in Portugal and its former imperial spaces.
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
“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
For further information about the Atlantic History Group, please send an email to Robin Derby (derby@history.ucla.edu).
