"Languages of abolition in the Río de la Plata, 1810-1860"

CANDIOTI, MAGDALENA

Cambridge

Conferencia; Afro-Latin American Research Institute Seminar, Harvard University,; 2020

Afro-Latin American Research Institute Seminar, Harvard University,

This presentation combines results of a book about to be published in Spanish (which is on the process of delegitimation and disintegration of slavery in the Río de la Plata) and sets an agenda for the next project I am opening (which involves tracing the dialogues among 19th century Hispanic South America elites, on the necessary and desirable strategies to abolish slavery and, specially, control people of African descent).First, I will briefly summarize the laws of gradual abolition dictated in the region and I will delve into the tensions between the radical, humanistic and natural law language in which those laws were expressed, on the one hand and the predominance of a "logic of manumission" -that is, of payment- in the ways (in which) enslaved Africans and people of African descent were materially able to access freedom, on the other.Secondly, I will present a small corpus of works produced in the RP and Colombia that discussed the legitimacy of slave trade and slavery. They are diverse in form and circulation but all deployed thorough knowledge of the global abolitionist debate and intervened in it. They presented elaborate anti-slavery arguments, anchored in various traditions and languages. I will identify these languages, trace and periodize their circulation in the Argentinean case. And I think they deserves to be tracked and periodized in all the region. Finally, I will explore the symbolic place that abolitionist policies occupied in the construction of a republican order in South America. I will point at the gap or the tension between the existence of these radical letrado speeches (whose circulation was fragmentary), and the predominance of big public silences around the illegitimacy of the enslavement of Africans. I will argue this contrast is symptomatic and eloquent about the early construction of a Rioplatense narrative of racial harmony and invisibilization of Afro-Argentines.