AHA Session 246
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Rhythms Ballroom III (Sheraton New Orleans, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Jane G. Landers, Vanderbilt University
Session Abstract
This panel brings together three historians of slavery to discuss how enslaved people in three different contexts navigated the challenges of creating communities and cultivating belonging in the face of exploitation and oppression. This panel theorizes belonging – by which we mean a sense of rootedness in a community -- as a means by which enslaved people claimed agency, mounted resistance, and developed their own ideas about their places in the world. Rather than seeing slavery as a form of “social death,” we examine how enslaved people re-imagined their social worlds under the yoke of slavery. Categories of belonging were unstable, but that does not mean they were nonexistent. Belonging was a powerful tool, and enslaved people across the Atlantic World used it to their own ends. Appealing to a sense of belonging could help foment resistance or sow discord. It could also construct and regulate a spiritual community or racial identity. From birth to death – from the baptismal font to the grave – enslaved people worked to create alternative understandings of social life and community within the constraints of their situation.
This panel will be of particular interest to historians of slavery and the African diaspora; the Atlantic World broadly construed; Latin America; the global early modern period; and colonial North America. It will also appeal to those with thematic or methodological interests relating to power, belonging, and interpersonal ties. The three speakers employ approaches from religious history, intellectual history, and legal history to illuminate the lives and experiences of enslaved people navigating the challenges of belonging, thus providing a detailed picture of belonging and enslavement across numerous contexts. Dr. Groth’s paper uses baptismal records to investigate race-making and belonging as tools of imperial control; Dr. Marquez’s paper uses church and legal records to examine contested freedoms and belonging as they related to race, religion, and power frameworks in the Luso-Atlantic; and Dr. Faulkner’s paper draws on notarial and legal records to understand the legal implications of belonging to a community while also “belonging” to an enslaver under colonial law in the Dutch Atlantic. Taken together, these papers grant us a window into the important ways that contested notions of belonging shaped the lives of enslaved people in the early modern period.
