This workshop aims to connect some of the rich historiography of slavery and emancipation in the Iberian Atlantic World to the fields of spatial and mobilities history. Historians of Atlantic slavery have made exciting advances in the last couple of decades, drawing on Black geographies, mobilities studies, and environmental history to explore how both the power to move enslaved people, and bondspeople’s contestatory re-purposing of movement, constructed and challenged spaces of enslavement and freedom. Paths of Enslavement positions Latin America’s diverse landscapes and social geographies of slavery at the heart of these discussions and reveal enslaved people’s ability to harness mobility in resistive, creative ways. A concluding roundtable considers how Latin American archive sources on this topic might be made available and used in school and university classrooms.

Programme - Monday 29 April 2024

11.45 Arrival, lunch

12.00 Welcome and opening remarks

12.15 – 14.00 Panel 1: Chair: Guido van Meersbergen, GHCC Director

José Lingna Nafafé, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Bristol: “Evidence that Demands a Verdict and the Verdict that Demands Freedom: Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionists’ Case in Rome and the Vatican Response for Universal Justice, 1684-1686”

Selina Patel Nascimento, Department of History, University of Lancaster: “Space Invaders? Slavery, Gender and the Remapping of Eighteenth-Century Portuguese Imperial Geographies”

Bethan Fisk, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Bristol: “In the Interstices: Religious Geographies of Eighteenth-Century Afro-Colombia”

14.00-14.30 Coffee

14.30-15.45 Panel 2: Chair: David Lambert, GHCC, Warwick

Oscar de la Torre, Department of Africana Studies, UNC Charlotte: “Secluding and Exhibiting: The Double Inscription of Planter Power in the Urban Space of Matanzas, Cuba 1818-1886”

Camillia Cowling, Department of History, University of Warwick: “Captura: Policing and Defining Enslaved Movements in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba”

15.45-16.15 Coffee

16.15-17.30 Roundtable: “Teaching Person-Centred Histories of Enslavement and Resistance in Schools and Universities”

Rosie Doyle, Department of History, University of Warwick;

Bethan Fisk, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Bristol;

José Lingna Nafafé, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Bristol;

Simon Peplow, Department of History, University of Warwick;

David Rawlings, School of Education, University of Bristol

17.30 Close

Many thanks to the University of Warwick’s Global History and Culture Centre and Humanities Research Fund for generously sponsoring this event.

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