OI Colloquium with Randy Browne
This paper is part of a broader book project about the role of enslaved drivers on British Caribbean plantations. Here, Browne uses the voluminous documentation of a rebellious conspiracy in Berbice (part of what is now Guyana) and focuses on the crucial role of drivers. Some drivers were leaders of the African “nations” that organized the rebel plot while others were whistleblowers who exposed it. Centering drivers thus offers an opportunity to reconsider the leadership, organization, and ideology of Caribbean slave rebellions as well as the complex and contingent politics of the enslaved.
Randy M. Browne, a historian of Atlantic slavery who specializes in the British Caribbean, is an associate professor of history at Xavier University. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), won the biennial Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians. Browne’s scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the U.S. Department of Education. His articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New West Indian Guide, and Slavery & Abolition.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
OI Colloquium with Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera
This paper approaches the image of children with piebaldism in New Spain concerning the issue of skin color, and the conception of the blackness of the period. Guerrero-Mosquera also will present visual representations and descriptions about the Afro-descendants, and will analyze the intersections on how these images circulated and impacted different social sectors. She will interpret the interstices that conjugate the perception of race and monstrosity in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera received her PhD from the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Mexico). Her PhD thesis analyzed the evangelization of Africans in Cartagena de Indias from an Atlantic perspective (1605-1698), especially exploring the Jesuit missionary project carried out in that port and comparing it to the type of evangelization shaped, especially by Capuchins, in Central Africa, during the same period. Exploring records in archives scattered across the Atlantic from Lisbon, Madrid, Évora, Seville, Bogotá, and Mexico City, the thesis demonstrates an important Atlantic connection between the evangelization processes of Africans and their descendants in America during 17th Century. She is currently expanding this research in a project that explores how European representations of monstrous Africans and Blackness solidified the idea of commercializing blackness during the height of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
She also is interested in disclosing and discussing the research findings in social networks through the Red Iberoamericana de Historiadoras (RIH: https://www.facebook.com/RIHistoriadoras/), a network that she directs along with other two women historians. Started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, this network is designed to reach the intellectual community, including Afro-descendant, Indigenous leaders and teachers.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
OI Colloquium with Casey Schmitt
Following the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, Spanish forces maintained a toehold on the island over five years of guerilla warfare in large part because of the food and shelter they received from three different semi-autonomous Afro-Jamaican communities on the island. While historians discuss two of the three Afro-Jamaican villages, they also often repeat the claim that Afro-descended peoples from one of those communities, the region around Porus, either “died out in the 1670s, fled to Cuba, or merged” with the Windward Maroons in eastern Jamaica. Reading across imperial archives, however, reveals that the Porus captives did not disappear or die out, they were trafficked off of the island by an English ship captain. This chapter is part of a larger project on human trafficking in the seventeenth-century Caribbean and focuses specifically on the experiences of captives trafficked across imperial boundaries during moments of war.
Casey Schmitt is a historian of early America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in human trafficking, colonization, and illicit economies over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In her research and her teaching, she is interested in tracing individuals who crossed imperial boundaries—by choice and by coercion—in order to understand how processes like colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and trade functioned in the interstices of early modern empires. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530-1690, which analyzes the ubiquity of human trafficking and captivity in the greater Caribbean and North America from the 1530s until the 1690s and what that meant for colonization, trade, and warfare in the region. At Cornell, she teaches classes on colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and corruption.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
