Thursday, April 23, 2020
10:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Zoom

This conference explored the ways in which human-animal interactions shaped the lives, labors, and ideas of enslaved people of African descent in the Atlantic world from the early modern period onwards. Rather than see plantation colonies and routes of slaving between colonial worlds as incommensurably different spaces, our attention turned to more-than-human geographies throughout the African diaspora–from Panama to Hispaniola, Antigua, Jamaica, and South Carolina–that existed across imperial boundaries. Seeing how forms of ritual practice and intellectual exchange involving animals in obeah, vodun, and candomblé brings into sharp relief how communities from very diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds engaged nonhuman worlds in similar modes ranging from producing apotropaic bundles to sacrifices for the purposes of drawing on supernatural and ancestral powers and for attacking slaveholders. By looking at material environments of slavery, including maroon towns and livestock pens, we further considered how diasporic Africans remade physical landscapes with stolen animals and how enslavers struggled to transform slaves and animals into equivalent subjects on the ground. We hope that these discussions involving different contexts in the Americas further longstanding scholarly interest in the recreation or reimagination of Atlantic African communities in the Americas, and further question ongoing debates surrounding agency as a useful conceptual apparatus.

Keynote Speaker

John Garrigus, Dept. of History, University of Texas, Arlington, “An epidemic that can only be stopped by the most violent remedy”: African ‘Poisons’ versus Animal Disease in Saint-Domingue, 1750-1788” 

Comment - Stephen Bell, Depts. of History and Geography, UCLA 

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Duration: 01:37:41