A collection of essays detailing how individuals remapped race, gender, and sexuality through their lived experiences and in the cultural imagination
For centuries the Atlantic world has been a site of encounter and exchange, a rich point of transit where one could remake one’s identity or find it transformed. Through this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Laura R. Prieto and Stephen R. Berry offer vivid new accounts of how individuals remapped race, gender, and sexuality through their lived experience and in the cultural imagination. Crossings and Encounters is the first single volume to address these three intersecting categories across the Atlantic world and beyond the colonial period.
The Atlantic world offered novel possibilities to and exposed vulnerabilities of many kinds of people, from travelers to urban dwellers, native Americans to refugees. European colonial officials tried to regulate relationships and impose rigid ideologies of gender, while perceived distinctions of culture, religion, and ethnicity gradually calcified into modern concepts of race. Amid the instabilities of colonial settlement and slave societies, people formed cross-racial sexual relationships, marriages, families, and households. These not only afforded some women and men with opportunities to achieve stability; they also furnished ways to redefine one’s status.
Crossings and Encounters spans broadly from early contact zones in the seventeenth-century Americas to the postcolonial present, and it covers the full range of the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, North America, and Latin America. The essays examine the historical intersections between race and gender to illuminate the fluid identities and the dynamic communities of the Atlantic world.
Table of Content
Introduction
1. ‘Our Dutchmen run after them very much’: Cross-Cultural Sex in New Netherland and the Dutch Global Empire
2. Las Casas de las Rabinas: Three Generations of Women in a Crypto-Jewish Family in Seventeenth-Century New Spain
3. ‘The Refuse of the Whole Creation’: Manhood, Misogyny, and Race in an Anglo-Caribbean Travel Narrative
4. Inhabitant of Saint-Domingue, today refugee in this place: Atlantic Networks and the Contours of Migration among Free Women of Color during the Haitian Revolution
5. Intimate Entanglement in the Early Republic: The Gendered Politics of Nation-Building in Early America
6. Building Black Civic Manhood: The Luiz Gama Masonic Lodge and the Beneficent Society of Men of Color in São Paulo, Brazil, 1894-1914
7. Great Circle Sailing: Alice Bache Gould in San Juan, or, The Making of a Twentieth-Century Atlanticist
8. White Noise? Desdemona and Transnational Voicings Through Time
About the author
Stephen R. Berry is an associate professor of history at Simmons University and the author of A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings.
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