Date/Time
Friday, April 11, 2025–Saturday, April 12, 2025
10:00 am PDT – 4:30 pm PDT
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 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 Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti / University of Zurich
Joseph M.H. Clark, University of Kentucky
M. Dores Cruz, Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne
Kevin Dawson, University of California, Merced
Christina M. Giovas, Simon Fraser University
Katherine Johnston, Montana State University
Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, University of Liverpool
Nydia Pineda de Ávila, University of California, San Diego
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.
Program Schedule
All times listed in Pacific Daylight Time
Friday, April 11
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: Exchange Over Time
Chair: Elizabeth Landers, University of California, Los Angeles
10:15 a.m.
Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, Universidad de Puerto Rico at Utuado
“Entangled Materialities in the Precolonial Caribbean Seascape: A Diachronic Perspective”
10:45 a.m.
Joseph M. H. Clark, University of Kentucky
“’In shadow of eternal spring‘: Local Climates and Atlantic Exchanges in the Caribbean’s ‘Little Ice Age’”
11:15 a.m.
Discussion
11:45 a.m.
Coffee Break
Panel 2: Empire’s Origins
Chair: Susan Amussen, University of California, Merced
12:00 p.m.
Kevin Dawson, University of California, Merced
“Underwater Empire: Enslaved Salvage Divers and the Making of the English Empire, 1545-1700”
12:30 p.m.
M. Dores Cruz, Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne
“A View from the End of the World: São Tomé’s Plantation Complex in the Origins of the Atlantic World and Modernity”
1:00 p.m.
Discussion
1:30 p.m.
Lunch
Exhibit of Clark Library materials in the North Book Room
Panel 3: Food and Labor on the Move
Chair: Robin Lauren Derby, University of California, Los Angeles
3:00 p.m.
Christina M. Giovas, Simon Fraser University
“The World on a Plate: Early Global Influences on Indigenous Diet in Colonial Curaçao Revealed Through Stable Isotopes”
(Co-authored by Christine Conlan and Michael Richards, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, and Claudia Kraan, National Archaeological Anthropological Memory Management, Curaçao)
3:30 p.m.
Molly A. Warsh, University of Pittsburgh
“The Material Realities of Itinerancy in an Early Modern Caribbean Context”
4:00 p.m.
Discussion
4:30 p.m.
Reception
Saturday, April 12
9:30 a.m.
Coffee and Registration
Panel 4: Materiality of Freedom Struggles
Chair: José Monge Larrain, University of California, Los Angeles
10:00 a.m.
Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, University of Liverpool
“Cosmopolitan Seascapes: Slavery, Rebellion, and Solidarity”
10:30 a.m.
Jacques Aymeric-Nsangou, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti / University of Zurich
“Angolares Marronages in São Tomé: Living Free on an Island of Enslaved from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century CE”
11:00 a.m.
Discussion
11:30 a.m.
Coffee Break
Panel 5: Representations Across Space
Chair: Sal Nicolazzo, University of California, Davis
11:45 a.m.
Nydia Pineda de Ávila, University of California, San Diego
“Distant Things Together? Moon Spots and the Mapping of Resources in the Caribbean World”
12:15 p.m.
Katherine Johnston, Montana State University
“Nursing in Treetops: Race, Gender, and Representation in the Early Modern Atlantic”
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. In-person registration will close on Monday, April 7. 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*