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Lemann Lecture Series: Mary Ellen Hicks

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Feb 9, 2021   2:00 - 3:30 pm  
Views
70
Originating Calendar
Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies

Black Cosmopolitans and the World of South Atlantic Slavery

This talk explores lives of the freed and enslaved African and creole mariners laboring on slaving vessels in the South Atlantic. It uncovers the complex relationship that early modern West Africans had with the sea—in both Africa and in the diaspora—which was defined not solely by terror and dislocation, but also by the recurring ability to capitalize on their proximity to oceanic environments, commerce, and flows of information to achieve a range of objectives, including legal freedom, material advancement and personal connection. Focusing on Atlantic world’s second most active slave trading port—Salvador, Brazil—it elucidates the connections between transatlantic slaving commerce and broader processes of acculturation, intellectual exchange, and the accumulation and circulation of material wealth throughout the South Atlantic and Bahia.

Mary Hicks is an Assistant Professor of Black studies and History at Amherst College. Her work examines the maritime dimensions of the African Diaspora, with a particular focus on eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial Brazil. She is a former Ford and Hutchins Center fellow, and currently is finishing her book Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835. Her published work includes: “Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade: Collective Investment Practices from Portugal to Brazil, 1500-1840,” in the Journal of Global Slavery and “Transatlantic Threads of Meaning: West African Textile Entrepreneurship in Salvador da Bahia, 1770- 1870,” in Slavery & Abolition.  

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