Speaker: Pablo Gomez
Lecture title:
Slave Trading and the Imagination of the Body in the Early Modern South Atlantic
This talk examines how the epistemic and material practices of slave trading communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century South Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds were fundamentally related to the emergence of novel ideas about quantifiable human bodies and corporeal facticity. The violent mathematics of these slave trading societies reified and institutionalized body quantification and population/group thinking in relation to labor, health, and disease in new ways. By examining the brutal history of corporeal quantification in slave trading societies alongside African diasporic histories of knowledge-making about bodies and medicine, this lecture underscores the fundamental continuity that exists between the enslavement of millions of Africans and the history of modern ideas about corporeality.
This event is also available via Zoom
Meeting ID: 965 0281 5770