GLC@Lunch: "Unsettling Race: Blood Purity and Colonial Worldmaking in the Early Modern Spanish Empire"

Isaac Gabriel Salgado (GLC Visiting Assistant Professor; Assistant Professor of Political Science, Trinity College)

“Unsettling Race: Blood Purity and Colonial Worldmaking in the Early Modern Spanish Empire”

The importance of race in shaping the modern world is often explained with reference to the foundational role of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in the development of capitalism and modernity. The former is posited as legitimating the enslavement of African peoples and their transformation into chattel and the latter as legitimating colonization and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. While the metonymic deployment of Blackness and Indigeneity as signifiers for (enslaved) labor and (expropriated) land may today be a familiar one, it can obscure the complex process which produced Blackness and Indigeneity as racial categories, defined in part by their relationship to enslaveability. This talk centers a key moment in this process by focusing on 16th century Spanish theologians’ justifications of slavery. By tracing their divergent approaches to the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples, and additionally drawing in the history of the transpacific slave trade and enslavement of Asians, I provide a closer look at the development of race in the early modern Spanish Americas.

Image caption: Theodor de Bry, "Nigritae in scrutandis venis metallicis ab Hispanis in Insulas ablegantur," 1595. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.