Captive Mobilities: Movement, Slavery, and Knowledge Production in the Iberian World

Abstract

Slavery relied on the violence of displacement – the incomprehension of being ripped from one’s community during a raid, the disorientation of being thrust in the darkness of a fortress cell, and the trauma of watching as one’s land became a faded horizon. This collection expands and deepens our knowledge of what generations of scholars have long established: that the violence of dislocation marked the bodies and the psyches of Black people. What the lens of captive mobilities offers is a framework to encapsulate the serial nature of this violence as slavery was made and remade with and by movement. As laws and customs attempted to keep pace with the ever-burgeoning institution, it adapted to modernity as locomotive tracks and steam engines opened up Cuba to a new era of slave investment. It united confederacy with empire, as Brazil clandestinely welcomed U.S slave owners who yearned for the perpetuation of their colonial fantasies. We see in these same histories how maroons created geographies by forcing Spaniards to take specific routes and how women marked the journeys of others as providers of sustenance, domestic duties, and care. Fear and reliance shaped these mobilities. While enslaved people considered which survival tactics to employ to lessen their exposure to harm and remapped hostile country sides, waterways, and cityscapes, they repurposed infrastructure, shared legal loopholes, and selectively offered their life stories to accommodate the demands of scribes and magistrates. With people illegally trafficked to the Global South, they forced slaveowners to consider and reconsider their thoughts on African Americans and Afro-Brazilians. Through their acts of piracy and marronage, they interrupted economies and set poorly staffed and meagerly provisioned militias on high alert. With ties that transcended borders, they forced slaveowners to appear in court to fight against their slaves who sought free soil. Enslaved Black and Indigenous people rarely gained their freedom through such maneuvering. However, they unsettled Spanish officials and disrupted the lives of slaveowners who callously uprooted and traumatized theirs. What held sway in Iberian legal culture shifted because slaves sought out legal redress. Spanish and Portuguese authorities debated what held greater