"On Afropolitans and Creole Cosmopolitans"

• In Event: Gendered Waterways of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic World

Description for Program

This paper uses the framework of “Afropolitanism:” one that blends African cosmopolitanism and diaspora studies to understand the movement of early modern Black people between the Iberian peninsula and the Americas. Afropolitanism emerges from studies of twentieth-century African migrations and mobilities and the cultural production generated by this movement in the arts, media, and literature (Mbembe 2020; Ede 2016, Ibironke 2021). In histories of the African American diaspora and slavery, scholars similarly emphasize a cosmopolitanism among enslaved and free Black people that derived from travels across great distances, generating an intimate familiarity with multiple colonial spaces, proximity to the political and economic power of Europeans, and a keen knowledge of the legal structures of slavery (Lightfoot 2022). While the historiography of Black maritime mobility recognizes the liberating spaces created by Black mariners (Hicks 2024, Walker 2022, Scott 2018, Rediker 2014), this paper explores the voyages undertaken by Black women who traveled between Atlantic sites providing domestic services for Spanish families. Black women in emigrating households and traveling parties cooked the food, they nursed small children aboard and kept them safe from maritime perils. It was the invisible labor of Black women domestic servants, as much as that of the sailors and the gunners and the carpenters that enabled the ship to cross the ocean with passengers and crew intact. Indeed, it was their labor that eased the transition and ardors of transatlantic travel and made the Spanish settler-colonial experience possible. I also embrace biography and self-fashioning to think about the liberatory potential of travel and a claim to homegoing gleaned in the sources that show how Black women claimed freedom through movement and relocation.

Author

• Michelle McKinley