“Policing the Colonial” with Sherwin K. Bryant | February 10, 2016
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 | 4:30pm
CRES Talks presents Sherwin K. Bryant on "Policing the Colonial: Slavery, Race, and the Development of Colonial Law”
In this talk, Bryant will seek to clarify and extend some of my ideas about slavery, colonial governance and the early modern colonial making of race through governing practices. The talk will build on Bryant's work Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). "Rivers of Gold", offers the first serious treatment in English of slavery and slave life in colonial Quito. By investigating just how and why slavery mattered in a colony that featured a relatively smaller slave population (no more than 15,000), "Rivers of Gold" challenges the narrower conceptualization of slavery as primarily an economic demand.
Sherwin K. Bryant is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, and Director of the Center for African American History at Northwestern University. As an historian of colonial Afro-Latin America and the Atlantic/Pacific Worlds, Bryant works at the intersections of cultural, legal, social history and political economy, with an emphasis upon Black life in the Kingdoms of New Granada and Quito (what is now modern Colombia and Ecuador).