Description:

To write about the Southern Pacific in the age of privateering has, with a few recent exceptions, been an exercise in writing about European men. To be sure, we owe much of our knowledge of this time and place to the men who published accounts of their experiences, including notorious figures such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. But their texts contain myriad – if frustratingly scattered and fragmentary – references to just how often these men and their counterparts engaged with enslaved and free people of African descent over the course of their voyages. In putting these fragments in conversation with one another and with archival records from the period, this talk re-centers Africans and their descendants within the age of privateering.

Tamara Walker (UVA) is a historian of slavery and gender in Latin America. Her work has received support from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Association of University Women. It has been featured in Slavery & Abolition, Gender & History, The Journal of Family History, Souls and The William & Mary Quarterly, among other publications. Her first book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2017. 

Sponsored by the Center for African American History, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, African American Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese.