GLC@Lunch with Isabela Fraga: “Bound to Feel: Personhood from Slavery to Abolition in Brazil and Cuba”

This talk examines how the semantic field of feeling—encompassing emotion, sentiment, spirit, and sensibility—shaped the long history of slavery and its afterlives in the two most lucrative coffee and sugar economies in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It traces how planters, doctors, clergy, writers, and legal practitioners sought to imagine, manage, and pathologize the inner lives of enslaved and free Africans and Afro-descendants. At the same time, it considers how those subjects engaged, reworked, and at times unsettled the affective frameworks imposed upon them. In this context, interiority became both a site of scrutiny and a space for negotiation, revealing how the cultural politics of feeling helped construct and trouble enduring narratives of racial harmony in Latin America.