“Defining Freedom: Infrastructures of Black Political Knowledge in the Early Spanish Atlantic”
Professor Chloe Ireton, Department of History, University College London
This talk explores the development of diverse infrastructures of Black political knowledge in the early Atlantic world. These infrastructures enabled Black individuals and communities across different regions of the Spanish empire to develop the know-how to navigate imperial power structures. In doing so, they expanded the meanings of political freedom in the Spanish empire and deployed discourses of political belonging that sought to position the Spanish crown and Catholicism as inclusive of Black people. The talk offers methodological reflections for writing histories of Black political thought in the early Atlantic world. The questions that animate these methodological reflections include: How did marginalized groups, including liberated or free-born Black Africans and their descendants, acquire legal know-how to craft petitions in royal courts?; What were the conversations and shared knowledge in particular sites that created the conditions for free-born, liberated, and enslaved people to develop resources and social capital to craft and submit petitions to the crown?; and, how can historians trace how people and communities learned about events and political discourses in faraway places and exchanged ideas and news in their daily lives that they later might deploy in their own petitions?
This event is presented by The Center for Early Modern Studies and is sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Department of History, Political Science, English, French and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, LACIS, and UW-Madison Libraries.