ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

HSS Distinguished Lecture: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of Science and Medicine, Pablo F. Gómez

Session Submission Type: Plenary Session

English Abstract

Gómez’s talk examines the transatlantic slave trade as a crucial site of epistemological transformation: a space in which concepts and practices that would later structure modern scientific and biomedical thought took shape. The talk focuses on the planning and execution of a scheme to transport a group of seventeenth-century African captives to the Caribbean. The history of this harrowing journey and its aftermath reveals a new genealogy of scientific modes of thinking about human bodies and populations through processes of universalization, mathematization, abstraction, and commensuration. The violent world created by slave-trading communities in the early Atlantic was, Gómez argues, fundamental not only to the emergence of scientific ideas about race, but also to the conceptualization of an aggregable and universal human corporeality. At the same time, the talk shows that African captives were not merely passive subjects of these processes. Rather, enslaved Africans and their descendants strategically engaged with regimes of bodily valuation and quantification, at times appropriating their logics while also contesting them. Their responses constituted some of the earliest critiques of the profoundly alienating models of corporeal mathematization and colonial violence that emerged in early modernity. Thinking with the early archive of the transatlantic slave trade invites a reimagining of the geographies, chronologies, categories, and sources through which we have conceived the histories of science and medicine.

Sub Unit

• ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Presenter

• Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin–Madison