Date/Time
Friday, February 21, 2025–Saturday, February 22, 2025
10:00 am PST – 4:30 pm PST
Location
UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library & via Livestream
2520 Cimarron Street
Conference organized by Carla Gardina Pestana (University of California, Los Angeles) and Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University)
Co-sponsored by the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World
The diverse peoples who converged on the Caribbean before 1700 held a range of differing beliefs, ideas about the natural world, and understandings of social, political, and spiritual order. Considering how Indigenous, African, and European systems of thought and faith clashed, adapted, and transformed will be the focus of this second meeting. We invite participants to consider how culturally specific systems of knowledge were expressed and transformed under emergent rubrics of what would become known as religion, science, and law. We will likewise reflect on how these ideas animated the creation and maintenance of institutions of governance and knowledge production both in the Caribbean and extending beyond it. This conference grants an opportunity to weigh how the globalization of the early Caribbean marked historical changes in beliefs and ideas but also witnessed continuities that cut across the 1492 divide. In the process, a multitude of convictions about spiritual, natural, corporal, social and political order helped shape (and were reshaped by) encounters in the Basin.
Speakers
Larissa Brewer-García, University of Chicago
Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Alexander Mazzaferro, University of California, Los Angeles
Elise A. Mitchell, Swarthmore College
José R. Oliver, Institute of Archaeology, University College London
Daniel Rafiqi, Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow
Jessica Vance Roitman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Casey Schmitt, Cornell University
Owen Stanwood, Boston College
Miguel A. Valerio, University of Maryland, College Park
About the 2024–25 Core Program: Early Global Caribbean
The Caribbean has been a site of global interaction and dramatic change for centuries. Although consideration of the impact of the forces of globalization on the region often focuses on the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries era of sugar and slaves, Caribbean people’s engagement with those forces long predates the period of the plantation complex. Yet a concerted reckoning with earlier global dimensions of Caribbean history, especially one that considers recent advances in scholarly understandings of Indigenous and early colonial histories of the region, has yet to be accomplished. This cycle of conferences and events will serve as an important catalyst for inter-disciplinary dialogue that will move Caribbean studies towards centering transformations in the region’s societies, cultures, ideas, and environments during a period that is conventionally assumed to be prefatory to the histories that followed in its wake.
Program Schedule
All times listed in Pacific Standard Time
Friday, February 21
9:30 a.m.
Coffee and Registration
10:00 a.m.
Director’s Welcome
Carla Gardina Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles
Introductory Remarks
Carla Gardina Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles and Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Brown University
Panel 1: Indigenous Flux
Chair: Brett Rushforth, The Huntington Library
10:15 a.m.
José R. Oliver, Institute of Archaeology, University College London
“Genocide, Ethnogenesis & Creolization in the Greater Antilles, XIV-XVIth Centuries”
10:45 a.m.
Alexander Mazzaferro, University of California, Los Angeles
“Hurricanes and Hammocks: Kalinago Knowledge and the Unsettlement of St. Christopher”
11:15 a.m.
Discussion
11:45 a.m.
Coffee Break
Panel 2: Crucibles of War and Dispossession
Chair: Andrew Apter, University of California, Los Angeles
12:00 p.m.
Casey Schmitt, Cornell University
“Captive-Taking and Human Trafficking in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”
12:30 p.m.
Owen Stanwood, Boston College
“Corsairs and Colonists: The French (Protestant) Battle for the Greater Caribbean, 1553-1573”
1:00 p.m.
Discussion
1:30 p.m.
Lunch
Exhibit of Clark Library materials in the North Book Room
Panel 3: Knowing Bodies
Chair: Daniel Livesay, Claremont McKenna College
3:00 p.m.
Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Early Black Caribbean Worlds and the Imagination of Modern Corporeality”
3:30 p.m.
Elise A. Mitchell, Swarthmore College
“Morbid Geographies: Quarantine and the Seventeenth-Century Slave Trade to the Caribbean”
4:00 p.m.
Discussion
4:30 p.m.
Reception
Saturday, February 22
9:30 a.m.
Coffee and Registration
Panel 4: Racial Imaginaries
Chair: Felix Jean-Louis, University of California, Irvine
10:00 a.m.
Daniel Rafiqi, Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow
“’Condemned to finish my days in the Americas’: Huguenot Deportees’ Experiences in the French Caribbean, 1687–89”
10:30 a.m.
Larissa Brewer-García, University of Chicago
“Slavery, Maternity, and Salvation: Senegambian Reflections on Loss and Solace in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias”
11:00 a.m.
Discussion
11:30 a.m.
Coffee Break
Panel 5: Diasporic Spiritualities
Chair: Arrannè Rispoli, University of California, Los Angeles
11:45 a.m.
Jessica Vance Roitman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
“West of Zion: Establishing Religious Rigor in the Jewish Caribbean”
12:15 p.m.
Miguel A. Valerio, University of Maryland, College Park
“African Catholics?: Black Confraternities in the Early Spanish Caribbean”
12:45 p.m.
Discussion
1:15 p.m.
Program concludes
The conference is free to attend with advance registration. It will be held in-person at the Clark Library and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. Registration will close on Monday, February 17. No registration is required to watch the livestream. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.
Image: Richard Blome’s The present state of His Majesties isles and territories in America… (London: Printed by H. Clark, for D. Newman, 1687). Clark Library Rare Book Stacks, E162.B65 1687*