Date/Time
Friday, May 19, 2023
9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Location
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
2520 Cimarron Street
–conference organized by Tawny Paul and Andrew Apter (University of California, Los Angeles)
This conference is free of charge. It will be held in person and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. To attend the conference in person, you must reserve your space by emailing the center( details at the bottom of this page). Bookings close on Monday, May 15, 2023 at 5:00 p.m.
Face masks are not required but are strongly recommended at all indoor campus events.
This conference will consider the commodification of human labor and life throughout the Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Disparate examples of commodification cross geographic and disciplinary boundaries, and they are rarely brought into conversation. Yet considering the range of ways in which human life and labor were commodified offers numerous opportunities to think beyond current paradigms of labor, commerce, and power in the Atlantic world. First, it forces us to think beyond the freedom/unfreedom binary normally invoked in Atlantic histories of labor. Second, it provides new perspectives to address questions of the fluidity between objecthood and personhood normally pursued from material culture perspectives. Third, it highlights the development of modern ideologies of race and gender. Finally, it encourages us to think expansively about the role of human bodies in the transmutation of different value forms. People participated in global commerce not only as consumers, producers, agents or forms of chattel, but as apparitions and pawns who facilitated the mobility of commodities in a nascent capitalist economy. The conference will be interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on historical and anthropological perspectives. It aims to bring European and African case studies into an Afro-Atlantic historical frame.
Speakers
Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University and Getty Research Institute
Herman L. Bennett, The Graduate Center CUNY
Lisa Cody, Claremont McKenna College
Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Craig Koslofsky, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Paul E. Lovejoy, York University
Polly Lowe, University of Exeter
Tawny Paul, University of California, Los Angeles
Susan A. C. Rosenfeld, UCSD T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion
Sasha Turner, The Johns Hopkins University
Friday, May 19, 2023
9:30 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration
10:00 a.m.
Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles
Director’s Welcome
Tawny Paul and Andrew Apter, University of California, Los Angeles
Opening remarks
10:15 a.m.
Session 1: Marking, Naming and Resistance
Chair: Patrícia Martins Marcos, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul E. Lovejoy, York University
“Resistance to Commodification – The Question of Naming”
10:45 a.m.
Craig Koslofsky, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Self-Ownership and Commodification: Tattooed Laborers in the British Atlantic to c. 1750”
11:15 a.m.
Susan A.C. Rosenfeld, UCSD T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion
“‘Certificates of Freedom’: Atlantic Mobility and Assertions of Liberty among Nineteenth-Century Afro-Brazilian Travelers”
11:45 a.m.
Discussion
12:15 p.m.
Lunch
1:30 p.m.
Session 2: The Limits of the Economy
Chair: Elizabeth Landers, University of California, Los Angeles
Lisa Cody, Claremont McKenna College
“‘People are the Wealth of a Nation’: The Invisible Handmaidens of Population and Profit”
2:00 p.m.
Polly Lowe, University of Exeter
“Market Morality, Contested Commodification and Exceptionalism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Body and the Market in Eighteenth-Century Britain”
2:30 p.m.
Herman L. Bennett, The Graduate Center CUNY
“Civil Fictions”
3:00 p.m.
Discussion
3:30 p.m.
Coffee Break
3:45 p.m.
Session 3: Keynote Address
Chair: Tawny Paul, University of California, Los Angeles
Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University and Getty Research Institute. [not available in livestream]
“Ngoyo Meets Dahomey: An Object of Prestige in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism”
4:30 p.m.
Q&A
5:00 p.m.
Reception
Saturday, May 20, 2023
9:30 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration
10:00 a.m.
Session 4: Technologies of Capitalism: Wages, Debt, and Quantification
Chair: Carla Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles
Sasha Turner, The Johns Hopkins University
“Wages and Incentives: Rethinking Technologies of Capitalism”
10:30 a.m.
Tawny Paul, University of California, Los Angeles
“Debt Bondage and the Commodification of Prisoners in Eighteenth-Century Britain”
11:00 a.m.
Coffee Break
11:15 a.m.
Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Body Arithmetic: Facts, Quantification, and the Human in the Seventeenth-Century Black Atlantic”
11:45 a.m.
Discussion
12:15 p.m.
Program concludes
Image: The Paston Treason, anonymous, (c. 1670). Norwich Castle Museum. Wikimedia.
To register please email c1718cs@humnet.ucla.edu with the following information:
Full name
Email address
Academic Status (such as General Public, UC Staff or Faculty, Student, Other Faculty, etc.)
Academic Institution if applicable
Lunch (Vegetarian/Non-vegetarian)