The Crime and Justice Research Centre will host a seminar this week with speaker Associate Professor Magdalena Candioti.
Topic: Slavery on trial – laws and judicial disputes regarding slavery in Buenos Aires, 1810-1860
Date: Thursday 23 July 2015
Time: 3.00pm – 4.30pm, afternoon tea provided
Venue: Room C412, Level 4, C Block, QUT Gardens Point Campus, 2 George Street, Brisbane
In 1810 when a revolution against Spanish authorities broke out in the Río de la Plata, 20% of the population of the capital, Buenos Aires, were black slaves. Did the revolution affect their lives? Did it improve their chances to be free? This seminar focuses on the changes of laws regulating slavery and emancipation in post-colonial Buenos Aires, as well as on the strategies the enslaved black population displayed in judicial courts in order to enforce their formal rights or to conquer new ones. Associate Professor Candioti will examine the traces of their discourses about freedom, patriotism, and slavery and also discuss whether these individual judicial disputes can be thought as contestations to the slavery institution itself or not and why.
Associate Professor Candioti sustains that it is important to understand together, how enlightened and revolutionary ideas inspired changes in the “moral sensibility” towards slavery, how it was translated or not in new laws, how enslaved men and women experienced and understood this ideals and laws and if they could use the revolutionary context and rhetoric to improve their situation. Far from establishing a causal link among elites’ and black population’s imaginaries we analyse how both interacted and moulded mutually in courts, until the age of abolition.
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