AHA Session 18
Conference on Latin American History 4
Labor and Working-Class History Association 2
Conference on Latin American History 4
Labor and Working-Class History Association 2
Thursday, January 7, 2027: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Rhythms Ballroom III (Sheraton New Orleans, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Romina Green Rioja, Washington and Lee University
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel brings together scholars of slavery and coerced wage-labor in Peru, Colombia, and Chile during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Engaging frameworks that imagine Latin America within the Pacific World, the papers examine how coerced bodies and ideas about racialized labor circulated across oceans, national borders, and urban and rural spaces. Whether those laboring bodies originated in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, liberal promises of freedom in the age of emancipation and republican nation-building had contradictory consequences. They engendered new regimes of violence and exclusion as well as politics of solidarity and new forms of community. The panel gathers scholars from diverse institutions, career stages, and areas of expertise. It enables conversation across the fields of history of African slavery and history of Asians in Latin America. Two papers examine shifting dynamics of slavery and abolition in Peru, Chile, Colombia; two papers explore Chinese and Japanese labor in Chile and connections to imperial projects in Asia. Panelists are in dialogue with each other on issues of gendered and racialized labor, diaspora, and articulations of nation within global dynamics of Pacific worlds. We intentionally designate ‘the audience’ as the commentator to maximize dialogue and will pre-circulate papers among ourselves in preparation for discussion.
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