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Speaker: Ronald Raminelli, Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor, DRCLAS & RLL
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
This lecture intends to analyze how blacks and "mulattos" were inserted in projects of nation-making in Cuba and Brazil between 1790 and 1850. Politicians and naturalists of that time were divided between pro-slavery and antislavery defenders, widely discussing the insertion of Afro-descendants in their own societies. The former defended not only slavery but also the insertion of free slaves, blacks, and mulattos as part of the heterogeneous population. At this time, the abolitionists fought above all against slave trade and considered the mixture of races to be an obstacle to the formation of the nation. Brazil was a monarchy, and Cuba a Spanish colony. Political sovereignty had influence on this debate and created different meanings for slavery.
Ronald Raminelli has a PhD in History from Universidade de São Paulo (1994). He is a Professor at the Department of History at Universidade Federal Fluminense and researcher A1 at CNPq and Faperj - Brazil. He received a research fellowship at Ibero- Amerikanisches Institut - Germany (1994-1995), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales - France (2002-2003), Universidad de Murcia - Spain (2012). He was an associated researcher at Universidade Estadual de Campinas – Brazil (2011-2012). His areas of academic expertise are colonial history, the idea of race, and nation between the 16th and 19th Centuries. Among his many publications, it is worth mentioning Imagens da Colonização (1996), Viagens Ultramarinas (2008), and Nobrezas do Novo Mundo (2015). In the new research project, he intends to analyze how blacks and mulattos were inserted into projects of nation-making in the 19th Century. Drawing on novels and memoirs, he examines not only the controversies between pro-slavery and antislavery politics but also the portrayal of racial diversity and the idea of the nation in Cuba e Brazil.
Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. He has published three books on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of the most important nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, and co-edited five other books on the social history of Brazil. His most recent monograph is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1995, 1999, 2004), a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2007), and a research fellow at Stanford University (2010-11) and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humbold Universität, Berlin (2013). He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT), University of Campinas.
Presented in collaboration with Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center
LOCATION:S-050, CGIS South STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20221116T170000Z DTEND:20221116T183000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR