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Slave Resistance, Criminal Law, and Regimes of Racial Violence in the Americas: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (1820-1850)

This lecture will analyze the dialectics between slave resistance and regimes of legal and extralegal violence in Matanzas and the Paraíba and Mississippi valleys, the most dynamic plantation economies in the Atlantic World during the nineteenth century. This investigation illuminates the contradictions of modern justice systems and the limitations of the rule of law in the Spanish Empire (Cuba), Brazil, and the American South. Despite the striking similarities between these slave societies, this comparative study also reveals that different political systems and legal and racial regimes contributed to the formation of distinct regimes of racial violence in the Americas.

Speaker bio:
Marcelo Ferraro is a Historical Injustice and Democracy Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Brown University. He completed his PhD at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) in 2021, having previously received his master’s degree in Social History and his B.A. in History, Law, and Social Sciences at the same institution. In 2019, Ferraro was a Global Fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History and a Visiting Graduate Student of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. He is one of the coordinators of LabMundi (Brazil and the World System Studies Lab) and a member of the Global History Network and the Working Group on Comparative Slavery. His dissertation offered a comparative study focused of slavery and criminal justice in Brazil and the American South. As a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, he expanded this research project and is currently working on his first book on slavery, citizenship, and racial violence in the Americas.
https://watson.brown.edu/news/facultyqa/2022/marceloferraro

Mar 7, 2023 12:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)