Fugitivity, Criminalization, and Blackness in Latin America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The course explores the ways that Blackness has been encoded and prosecuted as criminality in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas since the conquest and the introduction of the Atlantic Slave Trade, including work on the British Caribbean and African Europeans, which would invite conversations about contemporary British society. Its focus is on the criminalization of mobility and the occupation of space by people described as Black and historically tied to enslavement. Blackness, a social condition associated with phenotype, emerged from the Atlantic slave trade, which brought enslaved laborers from Africa to European New World colonies. But slavery was not simply a labor or commodity relation, it became a way to explain the existence of social hierarchies that included free people of color and associated a variety of gendered physical characteristics with them. We will spend some time examining how law and social relations dealt with Atlantic slavery, and then move into the modern period to think about how these ideas and frameworks played out in a world of Latin American nations (and territories) without explicit African slavery.