Dr. Herman Bennett (CUNY, History) will be presenting the Keynote Address for the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Symposium, "The Americas before 1620: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Indigenous Cultures, Colonialism, and Slavery".
Dr. Bennett's presentation, "Before the Humans: Africans, Sovereigns & Slaves", will explore how the focus on eighteenth-century race and commodification obscure earlier and equally expansive ideas about difference and dispossession. In taking up this question as a conceptual starting point, the talk charts a different, if not lost, genealogy of difference and dispossession that defined how Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries registered their encounter with Africans and subsequently classified some as subjects of sovereigns and other as sovereign-less subjects who could be enslaved.
This presentation is co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
This event is free and open to the public! For more information about this symposium, please view the flyer below.
