Sovereignties in the Atlantic World – Panel Debrief from the 2024 OAH Conference on American History

The Journal of American History

This special panel debrief edition of the Journal of American History Podcast features a conversation on "Sovereignties in the Atlantic World: Black and Indigenous Intersections," held at the 2024 OAH Conference on American History.

Historians of Indigenous peoples and historians of the African diaspora do not engage with each other often enough. Both sets of specialists generally presume that their fields operate by distinctive, and possibly incommensurate, analytics. Historians of Native America stress the importance of sovereignty, which underscores the nationhood of Indigenous peoples. The obvious counterpoint to sovereignty is subjection: conquest and the ways that sovereignty persists within colonization. By contrast, historians of the African diaspora have stressed a different dyad of slavery and freedom. Rooted in the transatlantic slave trade, the plantation complex, and the racialization of labor relations, these scholars center the violence of racial bondage and probe the ways that enslaved people sought liberation in ways small and large. In this episode, Miguel A. Valerio, Matthew Kruer, Hayley Negrín, Shavagne Scott, and Alycia Hall challenge the assumption that these frameworks are incommensurate and argue that both fields have much to gain through conversation. They proceed from the basic question: what happens when we think of slavery and sovereignty as two sides of the same conceptual coin?

Read more about the session here: https://oah.org/conferences/oah24/sessions/session/?id=5525

Music: King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band's Mabel's Dream, 1923

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