–conference organized by Tawny Paul and Andrew Apter (University of California, Los Angeles)

Presented in-person at the Clark, and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. 

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

This conference is free of charge. To attend the conference in person, you must reserve your space in advance. Bookings close on Monday, May 15, 2023 at 5:00 p.m. No registration is needed to watch the livestream.

Further details and full schedule on our website.

Registration