Description:

Sherwin Bryant's talk explores the many tensions that arose in the adjudication of slave marriages in the 18th-century Pacific Kingdom of New Granada. Examining annulment records found in the Archbishopric of Popayán, Professor Bryant explores the struggles that slaves, slaveholders, mining administrators, and slave mining captains had over the legitimacy of church-sanctioned slave marriages.

These cases invite both a deeper inspection of slave vs. slaveholder struggles over access and enjoyment of Christian conjugality while raising questions about sexual knowledge, sexual vulnerability, rape, and forced marriages within the gold mining and rainforest enclaves that dotted the Gran Chocó.