Early Global Caribbean: Conference 3: Materialities

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 tangible realities of daily life and the patterns of exchange in the Caribbean and the other Atlantic regions integrated into the Caribbean’s orbit enhance our understanding of the local dimensions of global processes that have long shaped the Caribbean Basin. This final conference will consider how the region’s early global histories may be tracked through their material manifestations in constructed and natural environments from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives. Focusing on the materials embedded and moving through Caribbean land- and waterscapes prompts lines of investigation about how historical interactions and social constructions of meaning were mediated across different historical moments. These interactions and constructions can be explored through physical artifacts, objects, and living organisms. We will deliberate on how both the environment itself and the material cultural productions of the people living in the Basin were profoundly and continuously influenced by the advent of different groups, the imposition of new agricultural regimes, and a host of other aspects of quotidian life that persisted, gained new forms, or disappeared. To what extent might the historical study of transformations in the circumstances of life in the Caribbean benefit from considering distributed agencies of different human and non-human actors across time? What do considerations of materiality in or beyond traditional archives contribute to a global understanding of Caribbean history?

Speakers
Jacques Aymeric-Nsangou, The University of Manitoba
M. Dores Cruz, Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne
Marisa J. Fuentes, Rutgers University
Christina M. Giovas, Simon Fraser University
Katherine Johnston, Montana State University
Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, Universidad de Puerto Rico at Utuado
Molly A. Warsh, University of Pittsburgh

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.

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. The registration form will post here approximately a month in advance, and registration will close on Monday, April 7 at 5:00 p.m. 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*