Black Legend or Black Atlantic?: Africa in the Spanish Atlantic Maritime World

The 10th Annual Brown History Graduate Student Conference will take place at Brown University on September 29-30, 2017. This year's conference, “Atlantic Trajectories: Trends and Movements in Atlantic World Studies," will highlight works that broaden current understandings of the Atlantic (and Pacific) Worlds. Focusing on trajectories, the conference will bring together scholars dedicated to a transregional approach to history of the Southern Atlantic in particular, and of a variety of time periods and frameworks.

Please join us at the JCB for the keynote address by David Wheat, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University, titled "Black Legend or Black Atlantic?: Africa in the Spanish Atlantic Maritime World." Whereas traditional depictions of the rise of the Spanish empire emphasize militancy and intolerance, sources generated in the Caribbean and Atlantic Islands reveal a broader range of Spanish commercial and maritime activities in northern and western Africa during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In keeping with recent historiographical attention to the diffuse nature of political and economic power within the early modern Iberian world, this presentation argues that Spanish overseas expansion took place on multiple registers that included cross-cultural exchange, and cannot be accurately separated from the Portuguese empire or from the various African peoples who participated — often but not always involuntarily — in the making of an Atlantic world.

The keynote lecture will begin at 5:30 p.m. and will be followed by a reception.