This panel examines bodies—their races, genders, flesh, secretions, movements, and senses—in Latin American history. Historians of race, gender and sexuality, medicine, disability, religion, and food have long attended to bodies, and scholars in other disciplines like African, African American, and diaspora studies, anthropology, dance studies, performance studies, food studies, art history, and literary studies have also contributed innovative approaches to thinking about bodies and how they move through the world. This session builds on those insights to collectively reflect on the following questions: What is gained (or lost) by focusing on bodies historically? How can historians uniquely contribute to an interdisciplinary literature on physical, material bodies across time and space? Why focus on the body, rather than say whole individuals and their identities (and, implicitly, how do these different components relate)? Without necessarily offering tidy answers, participants delve into particular case studies that relate to human and non-human animals’ bodies and how they have shaped Latin American history.

Drawing upon diverse primary sources (including visual, textual, and audiovisual materials) and theoretical approaches, the session considers the aforementioned questions and related queries across the colonial and postcolonial eras. Various case studies about diverse bodies shed light on political movements and ideals such as anti-colonialism, bodily autonomy, sovereignty, and environmentalism. Colonial violence and legacies surface through the examination of Black and diasporic artists from Portugal, Brazil, and Angola, who challenged the definitively white spaces that monumentalized Portuguese imperialism, as well as through the examination of breastfeeding women in Brazil, who were captured in paintings and drawings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black performing bodies managed to assert life, refusing death and archival silences. Breastfeeding women nursed, prompting larger meditations on care and intimacy in Brazil. Moving to political developments reflected and refracted through bodies, but now in the postcolonial era, nationalism and sovereignty shaped interwar Anglo-Argentine meat culture as the bodies of cows nourished the bodies of human consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the twilight of the Cold War, Brazilian forest dwellers put their bodies on the line to protect their livelihoods and the larger Amazon Rainforest from destruction, dovetailing with an accelerating global environmental movement. Across these eras, the session shows how in life and death, bodies were filled with historical meaning and substance.

The commentator on the panel, an expert on sonic landscapes, brings an important element to the discussion—sensorial histories. Bodies after all exist in the world, and as such, absorb and submit stimuli into the ether. Taken together, the session should be of particular interest to historians interested in race, gender, food, and environmental histories in Latin America.