Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City will convene a symposium exploring the ongoing impact of Luso-Hispanic globality in shaping identities, social distinctions, histories of merchant and commercial capitalism, and histories of aesthetic production and performance. How were Luso-Hispanic trade relations, settlements, and intimacies constituted a critical aspect of Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion to the Americas, Asia, and Africa? How did Portuguese presence in South Asia reshaped social structures of caste, gender, and religion, even as they set the terms by which new mixed race communities would emerge in Southeast Asia and coastal Africa? How did these processes relate to the trade in human chattel and the emergence of new extractive economies (currently referred to as racial capitalism), which resulted in an epochal geohistorical transition away from more dispersed, if complexly organized, social formations of early modernity, to enable the ideological and the economic dominance of the North Atlantic?

For more information, email adc2204@columbia.edu.