Unsettling Early Modern Colonialism as Pedagogy of the Present: The Atlantic, the Americas, and Asia

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This roundtable discussion seeks to develop a dissident pedagogy for the present by unsettling the semiotic structures of early modern colonialism. Attending to the disavowal of blackness, the first participant makes a critical intervention in debates regarding witch hunts as paradigmatic of the history of the European body in the transition to capitalism. The second participant examines the liberal-juridical production of “freedom” at the juncture between imperialist mercantile warfare and "conubium" sexual reproduction in the East Indies. The third participant explains the understudied influence of Plato in the development of the Spanish colonial social classification system.

The first participant, Cecilio M. Cooper, will examine how the ‘Witch-hunt’ appears in contemporary political discussions as a metaphor for state-sponsored crusades to surveil and criminalize dissent. Cooper examines the early modern contexts from which the phenomenon arose in order to uncover the disavowed significance of blackness within violent periods of moral panic. Traditional academic accounts often frame the original witch hunts as epitomizing gendered persecution of white European women. Cooper instead situates sixteenth- to seventeenth-century witch hunts as implicated in Europe’s coterminous engagement in Atlantic World slavery and racialized accumulation of capital. For clergy, blackness indicated Africanity and legitimately enslavable persons. For demonologists, blackness signaled supernatural possession. For physicians, it was a symptom of medical disease. These multivalent iterations of blackness converged in the colonial projects that precipitated the initial witch hunts, which suggests that blackness’ imagined influence over Europeans suspected of witchcraft cannot be conceptually divorced from its profane impact on other types of aberrant bodies.

Reading Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’s 1609 text “The Free Sea,” the second participant, June Yuen Ting posits the emergence of the ethical-juridical subject of freedom imbued with the rights of movement, access, and contact in relation to the production of colonial capital in the East Indies along with two structural axes of race/sex making: imperialist mercantile warfare and plunder, on the one hand, and colonial conubium or “intermarriage” as extractive reproduction, on the other. Unburying peculiar forms of unproductive labor embedded in these processes, Ting’s discussion seeks to understand the enforced production of nonvalue via commercial, sexual, and service labor as technologies of Asian racialization haunted by settler colonialism and chattel slavery.

The third participant, Daphne Taylor-Garcia, will examine the ways in which afro-castas (“mixed-race” black African peoples under Spanish colonialism) were described in eighteenth-century colonial documents. Taylor-Garcia’s research reveals that colonial writers referenced Plato’s philosophical works on distinguishing types of beings and governance in their discussions of “mixed” peoples. It is widely understood that Aristotle’s philosophy was central in the development of Spanish colonial ideology on the human and the triadic schema, but the influence of Plato has been understudied. This research situates colonial interpretations of Plato’s work as central to unpacking the logic of Spanish colonial classificatory schemas. Understanding the semiotic structures of early modern colonial discourse unsettles sedimented perceptions of race, gender, and sexuality so that we can critically examine the deep structures of our contemporary moment.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Chi-ming Yang, University of Pennsylvania

Panelists

• Cecilio M. Cooper, Northwestern University

• June Yuen Ting, University of California, San Diego

• Daphne V. Taylor Garcia, University of California, San Diego