Session: #687

Content:

European colonialism created an unprecedent chapter in the history of humanity. Flows of people, plants, animals, objects, goods, knowledge, and ideas took place, however, in a differentiated and unequal way. While positioning the Americas as its production centre, Africa, and Asia as its supply space, within these new geographical articulations, Europe became the centre for profit concentration. Whether during the colonial period in the Americas or the European expansion in Africa along the 19th century, processes of negotiation, adaptation and resistance to colonization generated contexts of interaction and struggle between the social groups involved (e.g., Indigenous, Africans and Europeans), as well as between these and the inhabited environment. In that sense, the making of the modern world, understood as a system of relations, is marked by the simultaneity of material assemblages and experiences related to violence and pain, pleasure or joy, and invention.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries colonialism developed additional specificities. It gave birth to new relations of dependency and subjection, now marked by economic dynamics and particular forms of exploitation (e.g., the end of slavery and intensification of smuggling, peonage in rural areas for the exploitation of tobacco, sugar, or rubber). Thus, the advent of what has been called the "Second Slavery" was possible insofar as new conditions were required for the very expansion of capitalism. Within this broad context in mind, we invite colleagues to present their case studies. Some of the questions to address are: Where, when, and how did individuals and groups confront the new conditions of inequality and living? How did the making of the modern world shape new “experiences of being" around the globe? How these analyses help to dimension the limits of modernity and to imaging new possibilities of relation?

Session: #687

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