2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

These dual panels compare how women and men of African descent across the Atlantic claimed freedom from slavery in its most potent space, the family. Spanning three centuries, the panelists join with U.S. scholarship on slavery as well as Africanists’ approaches to the household to consider the domestic, and illustrate the discursive and cultural methodologies of the emerging historiography of slavery in Latin America.

Through an examination of “carework’s” value (as explored by Michelle McKinley), the narration of domestic lives (illuminated by Mariana Dantas), and the public exposure of private life in slaveholding households (presented by Rachel O’Toole), Panel I maps out distinct gendered manumission strategies in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Peru and Brazil. Shifting to the nineteenth century, Panel II demonstrates how family politics of enslaved and freed people were critical components of international relations and the rise of market economies. Michele Reid-Vazquez’s exploration of how the Lecesne family fled from revolutionary Haiti to Jamaica reveals the racial and gendered dynamics of citizenship, while Keila Grinberg’s exploration of the clashes over the end of the slave trade along the borders of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina can be read through the experiences of an African woman, Rufina, and her family. Adriana Chira’s attention to the rise of coffee in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Cuba reveals the blurring of familial and market relations in generational negotiations of manumission purchases. Taken together, the two panels compare how women and men of color challenged slavery from intimate locations in Peru, Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba.