AHA Session 214
Conference on Latin American History 52
Conference on Latin American History 52
Saturday, January 8, 2022: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom C3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chairs:
Oscar De la Torre, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Robin Derby, University of California, Los Angeles
Robin Derby, University of California, Los Angeles
Papers:
Comment:
The Audience
Session Abstract
Although still widely envisioned as a “pristine” hinterland meant for preservation and modernization, Amazonia provides alternative pathways for inquiries into Latin America and Caribbean History. The most recent scholarly endeavors on Amazonian history have departed from a national-isolationist approach and focus on the historical contextualization and analysis of the Amazon as a trans-imperial and transnational space. This panel intends to deepen this conversation by focusing on the historical meaning of ethnicity and race to confront the colonial legacies that continue to construct Amazonia as a place without socio-cultural politics, a landscape closed to external influences. By bridging bodies of scholarship on Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic studies, the panelists show that the Amazon provided a critical, but deeply uneven space of interaction and socio-cultural formation for European, Indigenous, and African peoples and their descendants between seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Inquiring into Portuguese treaties and petitions for African slavery, Maria Barreiros Almeida Reis discusses the emergence of racialized discourses about Indigenous enslavement as the cause of an underdeveloped Portuguese Amazonia. Alexandre Pelegrino focuses on the lives of Indigenous slaves in the port-city of São Luis, Maranhão, where they shaped labor relations, marriage, and kinship ties that later influenced the arrival of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Manoel Rendeiro Neto follows runway enslaved Africans in the Amazon basin within the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century imperial crises. Rendeiro Neto argues that through mobility and cartography runaways transformed themselves into autonomous Maroons with territorial projects that denied the imperial sovereignties of French and Portuguese authorities in the North Cape on the Northeastern Amazonia. Using memory and oral history as an archival divining rod, Vikram Tamboli rearticulates processes of kinship formation among Indigenous, European, and African peoples by analyzing the practice of trafficking and the experience of enslavement and fugitivity in the borderlands between the Orinoco and Essequibo rivers of the Guianas. By challenging the disaggregated study of Latin American, Atlantic, and Caribbean Worlds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the panel interrogates the spatial and socio-political constructions of the Atlantic Amazon, and illuminates the critical, even if understudied, processes of land occupation, servitude, slavery, and labor coercion that bring together the study of the Americas.
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