The Program in Agrarian Studies presents:
Adriana Chira, assistant professor, Emory University and Fellow, Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University: “Silencing Race: Spatial Markings and Popular Race-Making in Eastern Cuba, 1820s-1860s.”
Adriana Chira is an assistant professor of Atlantic World history, with an affiliation in African Studies, at Emory University. She received her PhD from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in 2016. Her research focuses on race, slavery, emancipation, and the law in the Iberian Atlantic. As an agrarian studies fellow, she will be completing her first monograph–Free of Color: Slavery and Popular Ideologies of Race in Cuba, 1760s-1860s—which traces late nineteenth-century Cuban ideologies of “racial confraternity” to diffuse popular taxonomies of race in eastern Cuba. Drawing on research with notarial records, judicial cases, urban and rural property registers, sacramental records, and official correspondence, the manuscript examines how ordinary women, men, and families of various degrees of African descent conceived of color-based distinctions through practices of rural and urban property ownership and kinship. The project reflects more broadly on the impact of Caribbean borderlands and of the popular sectors on centers of power and on political ideologies that have traditionally been associated with intellectuals and prominent activists.