EVENTS FOR 2021-2022

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 BrownPhD 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 TerrallProfessor of History, UCLA
Transatlantic Blues: A French Botanist Experiments with Indigo

The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in pre-colonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes, collecting and cultivating African plants and mapping the landscape and natural resources of the region.  He traversed this landscape with a variety of African interlocutors and guides, whose knowledge inevitably, if often invisibly, informed his collections, maps, and scientific works. With particular attention to the materiality of indigo,this paper follows the archival traces of Adanson’s engagement with African indigo, including experiments conducted in an ad hoc “laboratory” near the French fort of Saint-Louis. Making scientific knowledge for European audiences (including the royal scientific institutions and the Bureau of the Colonies) depended on various kinds of local African knowledge, as well as on Caribbean plantation experience. This talk will explore questions about the geographies of knowledge and French imperial ambitions, through close attention to the material properties of indigo, the practices associated with its transformation from plant to dye, and the material remnants of Adanson’s engagement with it in Africa. This is both a microhistory of encounters in and around a tiny island off the West African coast and a trans-Atlantic story connecting Senegal to Paris and to French colonies in the Caribbean (Saint Domingue and Guyana). 

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.

Registration & Information

October 14, 2021

Degenhart BrownPhD 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.

Register

October 28, 2021

Alex MazzaferroAssistant 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

RSVP

November 1, 2021

Chris WilloughbyFellow 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?

RSVP

December 2, 2021

Sara JohnsonAssociate 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

RSVP


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*

Book Chat
Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross

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.

Register

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.

Register

 

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.

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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.

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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?

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March 11, 2021

Jenna Gibbs, Associate Professor of History, Florida International University

Protesting Slavery, Asserting Freedom, and Defying Racism at the African Grove Theatre in New York in the early 1820s.

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.

Register

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.

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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.

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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.

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May 20, 2021

Devin Leigh, PhD Candidate in History at the University of California, Davis

“The Origins of an Archive: Enslavers and the Geopolitics of Knowledge Production in an Age of Abolition”

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.

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June 3, 2021

Alea Adigweme, MFA student in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UCLA

A Prelude to the Vestibular: Reading Paratexts in Charles Shepard’s “An Historical Account of the Island of Saint Vincent” (1831).

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.

Register

EVENTS FOR 2019-2020

All events will be held in the UCLA History Conference Room, Bunche 6275, on Thursdays from 12pm to 1:30pm unless otherwise noted.
*Outside Events

FALL QUARTER, 2019

*October 3-5
Getty Symposium
“1519, the Arrival of Strangers:  Indigenous Art and Voices following the Spanish Conquest of Mesoamerica”
(unaffiliated event of interest)

October 10
Vikram Tamboli
Ethnobotanical and Landscape Archives in the Guyanese-Venezuelan Borderlands: Rethinking Atlantic Histories from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

*October 25-26
Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies Core Program Contested Foundations:  Commemorating the Red Letter Year of 1619– Conference 1
“20.  And odd Negroes: African Labor, Colonial Economies, Cultural Pluralities”
(unaffiliated event of interest)

November 14
Manuel Covo, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Entrepôt of Atlantic Revolutions. The French Colony of Saint-Domingue and Commercial Republicanism

WINTER QUARTER, 2020

January 23
Kittiya Lee, History Department, California State University, Los Angeles
Dressed to Impress: The Boundaries of Friendship and the Tupi Sovereign Body in Pero Vaz de Caminha’s 1500 Letter from Brazil

February 13
Thabisile Griffin, History Department, University of California, Los Angeles
On Property and Black indigeneity in St. Vincent

*February 21-22
Conference 2
“Burgesses to be chosen in all places”: Representative Governance Takes Hold on British Claimed Soil”
(unaffiliated event of interest)

March 12 – EVENT CANCELLED
Herman Bennett
Kings and Slaves: Diplomacy, Sovereignty, and Black Subjectivity in the Early Modern World

SPRING QUARTER, 2020

April 16
Animals and Slavery Conference

April 17–18 – EVENT POSTPONED/CANCELLED
Conference 3
“Respectable Women”: Gender, Family, Labor, Resistance, and the Metanarrative of Patriarchy

April 27 – EVENT POSTPONED/CANCELLED
Catherine Hall
Reparations

April 30 – EVENT POSTPONED/CANCELLED
Catherine Hall
Racial capitalism across the black/white Atlantic

May 7 – EVENT POSTPONED/CANCELLED
Elizabeth Dillon
Geographies of Reproduction: Gender and Racial Capitalism in Plantation Modernity

May 14 – EVENT POSTPONED/CANCELLED
Thabisile Griffin
Ann Barramount’s Petition to Sell: Property Struggles and Colonial Insecurity in 18th Century St. Vincent

May 21 – EVENT POSTPONED/CANCELLED
Mary Terrall
Title TBA


EVENTS FOR 2018-2019

All events will be held in Bunche 6275 on Thursdays from 12pm to 2pm unless otherwise noted.
*Outside Events

FALL QUARTER, 2018

October 4
Catherine Hall, Professor of History, University College London
Common Practices: Edward Long and Race-Making Across the Black/White Atlantic

October 18
Elyan Hill, Ph.D. candidate (UCLA World Arts and Culture/Dance)
Points of Encounter: Embodied Mappings of Domestic Enslavement in Ewe Mama Tchamba Performances

October 27, 9am – 5pm, 10383 Bunche Hall, UCLA
Conference, “New Directions in the Study of Black Atlantic Religions”
—– This conference is co-sponsored by the African Studies Center.  —–
Event Page

November 15
Marjoleine Kars, Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore
Slaves Remastered:  An Untold Story of Rebellion, Revolution, and Restoration in the Atlantic World

WINTER QUARTER, 2019

January 18
Enrique Rivera, Ph.D. candidate, UCLA
‘Precious Objects’ and the Manufacturing of Revolution in Coro, Venezuela, 1795

February 8
Kristen Block, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Holistic Medicine, Spiritual Healing, and Dis-ease in the Early Caribbean

March 1
Danielle Terrazas Williams, Assistant Professor of History, Oberlin College
Piracy, African-descended Women, and Crown Concerns in Colonial Mexico


EVENTS FOR 2017-2018

All events will be held in Bunche 6275 on Thursdays from 12pm to 2pm unless otherwise noted.

FALL QUARTER, 2017

October 12
Jessica Millward, UC Irvine

“Wombs of Liberation: Freedom Petitions, the Black Woman’s Body and Trans-Atlantic Law, 1780-1860”

November 2
Shantelle George, SUNY Oneonta

“The Kola Nut: A West African Commodity in the Atlantic World”

WINTER QUARTER, 2018

February 16, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
A one-day symposium follows the 1586 voyage of the ship Red Dragon. The ship’s little-known logbook, documenting its journey from England, to Sierra Leone, Rio de la Plata and Salvador da Bahia, illuminates the early interconnected histories of Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Speakers:
Vanessa Wilkie, Huntington Library
Eleanor Hubbard, Princeton University
David Wheat, Michigan State University
Kara Schultz, Vanderbilt University
Gabriel Rocha, Drexel University
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University

This conference is made possible by the generosity of our sponsors at UCLA: Department of History Atlantic History Fund and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair fund; Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS); and the Department of Geography

SPRING QUARTER, 2018

May 3, 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Lisl Schoepflin
Murúa and his Andean Collaborators: A Chronicle in Colonial Context

April 30, 5 p.m., 4302 Rolfe Hall (Lydeen Library)
Anna More, Universidade de Brasília 
Necro-Economics and the Early Iberian Slave Trade

April 26, 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., Bunche 6275
Fernando Pérez-Montesinos
The Atlantic Origins of Mexican Early Radical Liberalism

April 19, 12 p.m. to 2 p.m., Bunche 6275
Daniel Richter, Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania 
Four Fixers: The North American Misadventures of England’s Royal Commissioners, 1664—1665


EVENTS FOR 2016-2017

All events will be held in Bunche 6275 on Thursdays from 12pm to 2pm unless otherwise noted.
*Outside Events

FALL QUARTER, 2016

*October 2-February 12, Fowler Museum, UCLA
Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón
This exhibit is the first complete retrospective of the work of Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón whose work references myths of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society Abakuá: http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/nkame-belkis-ayon/. The show will also feature contemporary Cuban poster art.

*October 5, 7 PM, Fowler Museum, UCLA
They Are We
A documentary on Gangá Longobá, a Cuban dance tradition that invokes its African origins in Sierra Leone.

*October 26, 7pm, Fowler Museum, UCLA. Two Exhibition Lectures. RSVP required.
Andrew Apter, UCLA
Abakuá: Ritual, Memory, and Sacred Geography in Cuba and Southeastern Nigeria
Judith Bettelheim, Independent Scholar
The Public Face of Abakuá and the Work of Belkis Ayón

*November 15, 4pm, 306 Royce Hall
M. NourbeSe Philip
An Untelling of Zong
Postcolonial Literature and Theory Studies Colloquium, UCLA Department of English. Followed by a Q and A with Professors Fred D’Aguiar and Harryette Mullen
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, writer and lawyer who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto. Zong!a collection of poetry, is based on a legal decision at the end of the 18th Century related to the massacre of Africans on board a slave ship.

December 5, 12-2p, Black Forum at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, 153 Haines Hall
Dr. Alden H. Young, Departments of Africana Studies and History, Drexel University
Making Sudan Count: The Economizing Logic of the State
Hardcopies of Dr. Young’s paper are available at the African Studies Center, the Department of African American Studies, and the Ralph J. Bunche Center.
–Part of the Emancipation & Empire: Africa and the Project of Black Studies Series–

WINTER QUARTER, 2017

January 19, 12-1:30pm, Bunche 6275
Carla Pestana, UCLA Department of History
Quaker Mobility and the threat to English America
This talk considers the force and voluntary circulation of Quakers through the mid-17th century Atlantic
–Part of the CRS Faculty Lecture Series–

January 23, 12-2p, Black Forum at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, 153 Haines Hall
Maboula Soumahoro, Université François-Rabelais, Tours-Bennington College
–Part of the Emancipation & Empire: Africa and the Project of Black Studies Series–

January 24, 12-2pm, Bunche 6275
Marisa Fuentes, Associate Professor, Depts. of Women’s & Gender Studies, and History, Rutgers University
‘Refuse’ bodies, Disposable Lives: The Biopolitics of the Atlantic Slave Trade

January 26, 4pm, Anderson School Collins A201
Aisha Finch, Associate Professor, Gender Studies and Afro-American Studies, UCLA
Insurgency at the Crossroads:  A Book Talk by Aisha Finch

February 23, 5pm
Sean Mills, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Toronto
The Poetics of Exile:  Haitians and the Remaking of Quebec
Co-sponsored by Caribbean Program, Latin American Institute, the African-American Studies Department and the Department of French and Francophone Studies

February 27, 12-2p, Black Forum at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, 153 Haines Hall
Monique Bedasse, History and African American Studies, Washington University
–Part of the Emancipation & Empire: Africa and the Project of Black Studies Series–


March 9, 12-2pm, Bunche 6275
Winter Schneider, Graduate Student, Dept. of History, UCLA
Between Neocolonialism and Decoloniality: Property, Law and Insurgent Historicity in Haiti

March 13, 12-2p, Black Forum at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, 153 Haines Hall
Tshepo Masango Chéry, African & African Diasporas Studies, University of Texas at Austin
–Part of the Emancipation & Empire: Africa and the Project of Black Studies Series–


SPRING QUARTER, 2017

April 13, 12-2p
Greg O’Malley, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Escapes of David George:  Using Flight to Ameliorate Slavery in Colonial British America

April 24, 12-2p, Black Forum at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, 153 Haines Hall
Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Africana Studies, Cornell University
–Part of the Emancipation & Empire: Africa and the Project of Black Studies Series–

May 4, 11, 18 from 9:00am to 11:45am in the History Reading Room, Bunche 6265
Catherine Hall, Professor, Dept. of History, University College London
Making “Race” in the 18th Century Atlantic
This workshop will focus on the processes through which the binaries of black/white, slave/free were constituted in the C18 British West Indies.  English and Scots settlers in the Caribbean became identified as ‘White men’ with power; Africans became ‘negroes’ who became ‘slaves’. This process of ‘race making’ took place on many sites and in relation to multiple practices and sets of relations. It could never be complete for the binaries could not be fixed and were constantly de-stabilised. The work of attempting to fix them was central to the work of colonisation.  Each workshop will focus on one set of institutions and practices utilising both primary and secondary sources. Attention will be focused on  the law, the family and the plantation.
This workshop is open to graduate students, with priority given to those in History, African American Studies, or those affiliated with the Atlantic Studies Group. Reserve your place by contacting Carla Pestana: cgpestana@history.ucla.edu.

 

*May 5-6, 8am to 5pm
International Conference organized by Andrew Apter, Depts. of History and Anthropology, UCLA
Coins of the Realm: Money, Value and Sovereignty in the Early Modern Atlantic

May 8, 12-2p, Black Forum at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, 153 Haines Hall
E. Kwame Otu, Carter G. Woodson Center for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia
–Part of the Emancipation & Empire: Africa and the Project of Black Studies Series–

May 22, 4pm
Brett Rushforth, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon
“Political Life and Political Economy in a Caribbean Slave Rebellion: Martinique, 1710”
U.S. Field Colloquium, co-sponsored by Atlantic History Emphasis


EVENTS FOR 2015-2016

All events will be held in Bunche 6275 on Thursdays from 12pm to 2pm unless otherwise noted.
*Outside Events

FALL QUARTER, 2015

October 8, 6265 Bunche Hall
Vincent Brown
Designing Histories of Slavery in the Database Age

October 22
Aisha Beliso DeJesus
Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion

November 9
Tomas Robaina, National Library Of Cuba
The Black Press of Cuba: Nineteenth Century Sources
Co-sponsored by the Caribbean Program, Latin American Institute, UCLA

WINTER QUARTER, 2016

January 20, 4-6:00pm
Martha Few, University of Arizona
The Lives (and Deaths) of Caged Birds: Wild Animals and their Transatlantic Circulation from the Americas to Spain During the Eighteenth Century

February 10, 4-6:00pm
Winston James, University of California, Irvine
The Bolshevization of Claude McCay: The Radicalization of His British Sojourn, 1919-1921

February 24, 4-6:00pm
Lisl Schoeplin, University of California, Los Angeles
The Landscape of Andean Religion in Murúa’s Manuscripts

March 2, 7:30pm, Rothenberg Hall, Steven S. Koblik Education and Visitor Center, Huntington Library
Carla Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles
Oliver Cromwell’s Consolation Prize? The English Conquest of Jamaica

SPRING QUARTER, 2016

March 31
Nancy O. Gallman
American Constitutions: Life, Liberty and Property in Colonial East Florida

April 13
Christopher L. Brown
The British in Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade


EVENTS FOR 2014-2015

All events will be held in Bunche 6275 on Thursdays from 12pm to 2pm unless otherwise noted.
*Outside Events

FALL QUARTER, 2014

October 9
Jessica Krug, George Washington University
Fugitive Modernities, Spirit Biographies and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Reputation: Angola and the Americas in the Seventeenth Century

October 30
Kevin McDonald, Loyola Marymount University
Pirates and the Indo-Atlantic World

November 13
Susen Rosenfeld, UCLA
Mulheres de Négocios: Women’s Trans-Atlantic Networks in Nineteenth-Century Lagos

WINTER QUARTER, 2015

January 15
David Sartorius
Passport Control: Race and the Legal Culture of Travel to and from Cuba

February 12, 6265 Bunche Hall
Winter Schneider
Kesyon tè a: Land Ownership, Militarism and Historicity in Haiti and the French Empire

March 5
Aisha Finch
Slave Bodies, Carceral Temporalities: Rethinking the Caribbean Plantation

SPRING QUARTER, 2015

April 2
Catherine Hall
The Legacies of British Colonial slave-ownership

April 8, Royce Hall 306
Cécile Fremont, University of Chicago
Nature, Culture, and Faith in Translation: Capuchin Missionary Images and Cross-Cultural Knowledge in Kongo and Angola, 1650–1750

April 16
Alex Borucki
Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America

May 7
Elena Schneider
Cuba in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World

May 21
Nicole Gilhuis
Settler, Acadian, Cajun: Studying a Changing People in the French Atlantic


EVENTS FOR 2013-2014

All events will be held in Bunche 6275 on Thursdays from 12pm to 2pm unless otherwise noted.
*Outside Events

WINTER QUARTER, 2014

Atlantic History Series_thumbnailJanuary 16
Molly Warsh, University of Pittsburgh
The Political Ecology of the Early Spanish Caribbean

January 30
Alison Games, Georgetown University
English and Dutch in Suriname: Entangled Atlantics in the Seventeenth Century

February 13
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, USC
“Arrest all the Anglophones”: Sailors and the Making of American Nationality, ca. 1790s

February 27
Sharla Feff, Occidental College
Social Death and Social Life in Recaptive African Forced Migrations

The Atlantic History Winter 2014 Speaker Series is organized by the Atlantic History Cluster and Funded by the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair.