Adriana Chira

Jessica R. Pliley and Zoe Trodd, of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group join Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies. 

Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of Atlantic World History (Ph.D. University of Michigan, M.A. Cornell University, B.A. Cambridge University, UK).

Her first book project, Becoming Free of Color: Popular Racial Thought in Cuba, 1791-1868, explores vernacular ideologies of race in the eastern province of Santiago, home of the first official Cuban ideal of “racial confraternity” during the War of Independence from Spain (1868-1898). Drawing on social and legal history methods, and on insights from critical geography and ecocriticism, Becoming Free of Color explores how official and vernacular racial identities were mapped onto, contested, and remade through the rural and urban landscapes that were supposed to fix them in a Caribbean borderland situated outside yet in the orbit of plantation economies. Becoming Free of Color also offers a meditation on how to write histories of non-plantation Caribbean borderlands. Primary sources include notarial and ecclesiastical records, judicial cases, manuscript census returns, property registers, and official correspondence collected over two years of research in Cuba, Spain, France, and the U.S..

Her second book project is a study of reverse Atlantic networks following Iberian expansionism into North and West Africa after the 1860s, as the Spanish Crown, Catalan merchants, and some planters in Cuba became eager to make investments in new colonies. With attention to Barcelona, Morocco, and Bioko, the project will explore the emergence of new forms of social control in the Iberian Atlantic as the institution of slavery was being rolled back in the Americas. It will focus on how policy-makers in Spain approached children, convicts, and immigrant laborers as a testing ground for new theories of heredity and race, penal discipline, and citizenship rights. 

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