Gendered Waterways of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic World

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This panel moves along myriad aqueous routes in the Afro-Iberian Atlantic World to draw attention to interconnected histories of slavery, freedom, and gender. In "Gendering Waterborne Labor: African Grumetes, Coastal Waterways, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Mary Hicks explores how Portuguese sea captains relied on African grumetes’ (shipboard assistants’) maritime expertise and linguistic knowledge during the early years of the slave trade. While men are at the center of Hicks’ analysis, Michelle McKinley shows us that women were also key maritime figures. “On Afropolitans and Creole Cosmopolitans” spotlights Black women who provided invaluable shipboard services to Spanish families crossing the Atlantic to Spanish America. They cooked, cleaned, and cared for the young and infirm, during journeys that instilled a sense of cosmopolitanism and offered the possibility of freedom. Building on the idea of water as a route to freedom is Tamara J. Walker’s “The Many Lives, Deaths, and Myths of Black Caesar, a Pirate Lost to History," which follows the legend of a man whose most notorious exploits took place in the treacherous waters of the Florida Keys. Black Caesar emerges as an emblem of both fantasies and fears concerning Black male freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further south, off the Caribbean coast of Columbia, Valeria Mantilla Morales takes us out of the realm of myths and legends into the pages of documented conflicts between free people of color and colonial officials over rights to land and community. In “‘An Academy of Disobedients’”: Free People of Colour’s Cartographies of Water and Land on Colombia’s Magdalena River,” Mantilla Morales also provides a fitting bookend to a panel that starts with the harrowing journey of the transatlantic slave trade that turned humans into commodities and ends with people of African descent claiming waterways as a “territory of self-definition” and freedom.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Mary Hicks, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• "Gendering Waterborne Labor: African Grumetes, Coastal Waterways, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade" - Mary Hicks, University of Chicago

• "On Afropolitans and Creole Cosmopolitans" - Michelle McKinley

• "The Many Lives, Deaths, and Myths of Black Caesar, a Pirate Lost to History" - Tamara Walker, Barnard College, Columbia University

• “An Academy of Disobedients”: Free People of Colour’s Cartographies of Water and Land on Colombia’s Magdalena River - Valeria Mantilla Morales, Stonybrook University